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Lords of the Horizons

A History of the Ottoman Empire

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Lords of the Horizons

By: Jason Goodwin
Narrated by: Grahame Edwards
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About this listen

The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts. For over 600 years the empire swelled and declined, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled over the Danube and the Euphrates with the richest court in Europe. But its decline was prodigious, protracted and total.

©1998 Jason Goodwin (P)2018 Audible, Ltd Anthropology Middle East Turkey World Imperialism Ottoman Empire Middle Ages Crusade Iran Africa War
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Lords of the Horizons is a beautifully written book that paints a portrait of a world fantastically different from our own. It gives an extraordinary insight into the Ottoman Empire and its rulers and people. What it isn't is a history in any usual sense of the word. Whilst guided by a vague chronology, it does not link one event to another and provides a series of anecdotes that form dreamlike impressions rather than understanding.

The narrator has a pleasant delivery but frequently muddles words or mispronounces them. This creates bizarre results so that a monastery is granted libertines and the empire has many tongs. Unsurprisingly, foreign names, including Turkish, are garbled and sometimes simply mumbled so it can be difficult to know what is going on.

Overall, it feels like much less than it should have been.

Fascinating, impressionistic book marred by narration

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Descriptive, with some decent historiography, this narrative of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Turks is brilliant.

Great overview of the Ottoman Empire.

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This is the story of the Ottamans from a totally western perspective. For all references are from western sources and it is therefore a total bias picture which should be taken as I believe it was intended, for entertainment not serious study.

Orientalist view

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The author is clearly a learned man and writes an interesting history of the Ottomans. The narrator has a pleasing voice, but a poor command of the English language. I started making a list of all his mispronounced words, garbled English, and just plain mangled utterances, but there were so many I gave up, and to list them all here would bore any reader of my review. I blame the producers of this audiobook for their poor choice of narrator and their appalling quality control in allowing such a flawed soundtrack to be released.
Read the book by all means, just don't listen to it.

Narrator's illiteracy spoils a good account

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I don't think I'd pass an exam after hearing this, but it was very interesting just the same.

A trifle chaotic but full of insights.

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