From Life Itself

Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan

De: Suzy Hansen

Narrado por: Suzy Hansen

One neighborhood in Istanbul: a window on a city, country, region, and world in a state of upheaval.

Karagumruk, an Istanbul neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for its cheap apartment blocks and petty thieves—and a massive influx of Syrian refugees. It's here that Suzy Hansen went looking for the truth behind the headlines of the Turkish president Erdoğan's authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an accelerating geopolitical crisis. She discovered the neighborhood's secrets and got to know its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist for Erdoğan's Islamic nationalist AK party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail.

From Life Itself is the absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change. But in a remarkable turn, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagumruk to the forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of what we'd soon see in other countries, the resurgence of authoritarianism? Or do the lives of this neighborhood, and the transformations of Erdoğan's Turkey, reveal a more complex story?

The author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, Hansen explores Turkey's place in the world as no other writer has. From Life Itself is a book for our time—a story for a world out of joint, and for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"No modern history of Turkey, told through the complex lives and perspectives of its inhabitants, could be more compelling than Suzy Hansen’s. In it, she traces not only a nation in all of its specificity, but also the essential elements of the rise of autocracy." —Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Circle of Hope and Amity and Prosperity