Best of
Turkish

2010

The Cat Lover's Bundle: Homer's Odyssey and Love Saves the Day (2-Book Bundle)


Gwen Cooper - 2010
    Featuring Cooper’s inspiring memoir, Homer’s Odyssey, and her cat-narrated novel, Love Saves the Day, this eBook bundle is perfect for readers who’ve ever known unswerving feline devotion, fallen asleep with a purring kitten nestled in their arms, or wondered what their cat was really thinking.  HOMER’S ODYSSEY A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat  “Touching . . . one not to miss.”—USA Today   The last thing Gwen Cooper wanted was another cat. She already had two, not to mention an underpaying job and a recently broken heart. Then Gwen’s vet called with a story about a three-week-old eyeless kitten who’d been abandoned. It was love at first sight. Everyone warned that Homer would be an “underachiever,” but the kitten nobody believed in quickly grew into a three-pound dynamo who scaled seven-foot bookcases, survived alone for days after 9/11 in an apartment near the World Trade Center, and even saved Gwen’s life when he chased off a home intruder. By the time Gwen met the man she would marry, Homer had taught her the most valuable lesson of all: Love isn’t something you see with your eyes.  LOVE SAVES THE DAY A Novel  “Prudence [is a] sassy but sensitive feline heroine.”—Time   When five-week-old Prudence meets a woman named Sarah in a deserted construction site on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she knows she’s found the human she was meant to adopt. For three years their lives are filled with laughter, tuna, catnaps, music, and the unchanging routines Prudence craves. Then one day Sarah doesn’t come home. When Sarah’s estranged daughter and her husband arrive with boxes, Prudence knows that her life has changed forever. Poignant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Love Saves the Day is the story of a mother, a daughter, and the irrepressible feline who becomes the bridge between them. Prudence, a cat like no other, is sure to steal your heart.  Praise for Gwen Cooper Homer’s Odyssey   “Moving, insightful, and often hilarious, Homer’s Odyssey is about a blind cat with a spirit of epic proportions. Read and rejoice!”—Sy Montgomery, author of The Good Good Pig   “Cooper is a genial writer with both a sense of humor and a gift for conveying the inner essence of an animal. . . . The indefatigable feline should be an inspiration to us all.”—The Christian Science Monitor   “A wonderful book for animal lovers.”—Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation  Love Saves the Day  “[A] poignant tale . . . [Gwen Cooper] once again demonstrates her compassionate fluency in felinespeak and proves equally adept at conveying complex human emotions with flair and sensitivity.”—Booklist  “A reason to stand up and cheer . . . Once again Gwen Cooper shines her light on the territory that defines the human/animal bond.”—Jackson Galaxy, star of My Cat from Hell and author of Cat Daddy  “A charming story of love lost and found . . . Love Saves the Day eloquently explains why so many of us would do anything at all for our pets.”—Barbara Delinsky, New York Times bestselling author of Escape

Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan


Avner Ben-Zaken - 2010
    Avner Ben-Zaken's account of how the text traveled demonstrates the intricate ways in which autodidacticism was contested in and adapted to diverse cultural settings.In tracing the circulation of the "Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan," Ben-Zaken highlights its key place in four far-removed historical moments. He explains how autodidacticism intertwined with struggles over mysticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, controversies about pedagogy in fourteenth-century Barcelona, quarrels concerning astrology in Renaissance Florence, and debates pertaining to experimentalism in seventeenth-century Oxford. In each site and period, Ben-Zaken recaptures the cultural context that stirred scholars to relate to "Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓan" and demonstrates how the text moved among cultures, leaving in its wake translations, interpretations, and controversies as various as the societies themselves. Pleas for autodidacticism, Ben-Zaken shows, not only echoed within close philosophical discussions; they surfaced in struggles for control between individuals and establishments.Presented as self-contained histories, these four moments together form a historical collage of autodidacticism across cultures from the late Medieval era to early modern times. The first book-length intellectual history of autodidacticism, this novel, thought-provoking work will interest a wide range of historians, including scholars of the history of science, philosophy, literature, Europe, and the Middle East.

Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945


Thomas Kühne - 2010
    What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? In this illuminating book, Thomas Kühne offers a provocative answer. In addition to the hatred of Jews or coercion that created a genocidal society, he contends, the desire for a united “people’s community” made Germans conform and join together in mass crime.Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, the author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.

Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul


Amy Mills - 2010
    Mills analyzes these places in a street-by-street ethnographic tour. She looks at how memory is conveyed and contested in Kuzguncuk’s built environment, whether through the popular television programs filmed on location there or in the cross-class alliance that sprung up to advocate the preservation of an old market garden. Overall, she finds that the neighborhood’s landscape not only connotes feelings of “belonging and familiarity” connected to a “narrative of historic multiethnic harmony” but also makes these ideas appear to be uncontestably real, or true. The resulting nostalgia bolsters a version of Turkish nationalism that seems cosmopolitan and benign. This study of memories of interethnic relationships in a local place examines why the cultural memory of tolerance has become so popular and raises questions regarding the nature and meaning of cosmopolitanism in the contemporary Middle East. A major contribution to urban studies, human geography, and Middle East studies, Streets of Memory is imbued with a sense of genuine connection to Istanbul and the people who live there.

Istanbul Contrasts


Elif Shafak - 2010
    Its art is sought after by international collectors, its fashion is feted on catwalks, and its design and architecture are widely admired by critics and public alike. Compiled by some of the region's leading movers and shakers, this groundbreaking book gives readers an inside guide to Istanbul's new cultural landscape, its history and artistic heritage, accompanied throughout by stunning images from the lenses of leading photographers.

An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliyâ Çelebi


Evliyâ Çelebi - 2010
    He is in the pantheon of the great travel-writers of the world, though virtually unknown to western readers. This brand new translation by the foremost scholar of his age, brings Evliya sparkling to life, so that we can relish his charm and intelligence once more, whether he is describing high jinks in the bathhouses, being kidnapped by bandits, Ottoman Istanbul in its baroque heyday or a worldwide convention of trapeze artists.

Sufi Flights: Poems of Yunus Emre


Yunus Emre - 2010
    This new translation into English by Judith Reynolds Brown offers an affirmation of Emre's mystic Sufism and deep humanism which is as timely today as it was when written.