Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town

"A finely written, brave, and very personal book." -Orhan Pamuk

In 2001, Christopher de Bellaigue wrote a story for The New York Review of Books, in which he briefly discussed the killing and deportation of half a million Armenians from Turkey in 1915. These massacres, he suggested, were best understood as part of the struggles that attended the end of the Ottoman Empire. Upon publication, the Review was besieged with letters asserting that this was not war but genocide. How had he gotten it so wrong? De Bellaigue set out for Turkey's troubled southeast to discover what really happened. What emerged is both an intellectual detective story and a reckoning with memory and identity. Rebel Land unravels the enigma of the Turkish twentieth century-a time that contains the death of an empire, the founding of a nation, and the near extinction of a people.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 03/29/2011
ISBN: 9780143118848
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 8.47h x 5.59w x 0.62d

Review Citations: New York Times Book Review 04/10/2011 pg. 28