The On The Bookshelf Podcast

Si Sheppard on the Ottoman Empire & Impact on Modern Middle East & Europe

“Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age” by Si Sheppard (Osprey)

 

This volume involves “some of the most bitterly contested terrain in human history, from the Balkans to the Middle East and via the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, with the political and cultural environment repeatedly changing hands between multiple ethnic, linguistic and religious identities over the course of several millennia.” The Ottomans/Moors/Persians/Muslims were the determined enemies of the Christians of the Middle East, North Africa and Europe practically since their inception in the 8^th century.

 

For centuries, the people of Europe were invaded from the East and the South, as wave after wave of steppe nomads- Huns, Magyars and Mongols- battered the sedentary states of Europe. It was only by the Age of Exploration that European states turned the tide against them as they set forth on the great oceans.

 

“Above all else in significance, from the perspective of Western Europe, was the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the 16^th century across five separate geopolitical theaters”: the Balkans, the Med, the Indian Ocean, the Persian, and the Russian. However, this overreach would be the eventual downfall of the imperialistic empire. Acquired lands meant additional strains to secure and garrison them.

 

Europe was seldom united against the Ottomans; often, smaller states especially the Italians city-states, and the small Eastern European nations became allies with the Ottomans for their own political purposes, generally internal power struggles. The unsuccessful Seige of Vienna in 1683 was the high-water mark of Ottoman incursion into Eastern Europe.

 

In the early 16^th century, it became common for Catholic nations to ally with Muslims to fight the Protestants! (However, Suleiman the Magnificent admired Martin Luther!) Meanwhile, the Sunni Ottomans were likewise locked in an endless cycle of war against the Shia Safavid dynasty of Persian. Fratricide would be a recurring feature of the Ottoman succession for centuries.

 

The Ottomans missed their moment to break out of the “cul-de-sac of the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in one direction, and the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to the Indian Ocean in the other. Similarly, Ottoman expansion westwards across the north coast of Africa came too late, and fell too far short”, to enable them to stop the Oceanic enterprise of the Portuguese and newly-“un-Moored” Spanish..

 

“Prior to the mid-18^th century at the earliest, Europeans were not militarily dominant relative to other civilizations anywhere on land in Eurasia, including Europe.” But it changed with the wealth acquired in the New World and the colonization thereof. The Ottomans would be defeated in Greece in that era, and the slow downhill slide culminated in its dissolution after Nov.1918.

Melody Carlson's 25 Xmas Novella!

Once Upon A Christmas Carol by Melody Carlson FINAL-

Music journalist Alan Light on the Continued Popularity of RUMOURS

So why are young people discovering Fleetwood Mac's seminal hit LP, "Rumours" almost 50 years later? We talk to  Emmy Award–winning music journalist Alan Light to find out! His latest book is "Don't Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac's RUMOURS LP" (Atria Books). He is the author of numerous books including The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (which was adapted into an acclaimed documentary), as well as Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain and biographies of Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, and the Beastie Boys. He was the cowriter of bestselling memoirs by Gregg Allman and Peter Frampton. Alan was a senior writer at Rolling Stone and the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin. He contributes frequently to The New York Times, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal, among many publications, and cohosts the podcast Sound Up! With Mark Goodman and Alan Light.

 

Will Hazelgrove-Evil on the Roof of the World: cycling trip ends in terror

Nell Bernstein on the Dismantling of Youth Prisons in America

In journalist Nell Bernstein's new book, In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison,there are startling facts!

 Over the past twenty years, one state after another has done what at the close of the last century would have seemed unimaginable: shuttered its youth prisons and stopped trying children as adults, slashing the number of kids locked in cages by a stunning 75 percent!

 How did this remarkable change come about? In the sequel to her award-winning Burning Down the House, Bernstein illuminates the forces that converged to move us from a moral panic about “juvenile superpredators” at the turn of the century, to a time in which the youth prison is rapidly fading from view.

 In Our Future We Are Free begins and ends with the imprisoned youth who took a leading role in their own liberation. Through vivid profiles, Bernstein chronicles the tireless work of mothers, activists, litigators, researchers, and journalists to expose and challenge the racist brutality of youth prisons—as well as the surprising story of prison officials who worked from the inside to close their institutions for good. And the examples of how communities are pursuing safety, rehabilitation, and accountability outside of locked institutions offers a model for how we might overcome our addiction to incarceration writ large.