Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey Book

A great book. At 500 pages, it still feels like a whirlwind tour through the life of the father of the Turkish Republic. The man got an incredible amount done in a sadly short life. Prior to reading the book I only had a broad stroke sense of it, but this book makes the sheer scale of his achievement clear. Ataturk, and the people surrounding him, managed to reverse 200 years of decline and place Turkey on an upswing. That they were able to do this while being besieged by the victors of World War I, and without the middle class that their predecessors had deported/executed is truly extraordinary. Mango manages to provide the outlines of this accomplishment, and much of its historical context both briefly and enjoyably.

Mango manages to avoid outright hagiography, pointing out Ataturk's many flaws and getting a lot closer to an honest description of the Armenian issue than I thought you could get while publishing in Turkey. As is probably inevitable in a biography, most of the supporting characters come across as one-dimensional. The men and women surrounding him are either dedicated idealists, or thuggish hangers-on there doesn't seem to be much in between. None of the other characters get more than one note to play. Mango's description of Ismet Inonu also seems to strain credibility a bit. Nobody could be that capable.

Mango refers to Ataturk as a "man of the enlightenment" on a couple of occasions and I like that formulation. You could see him as the last, and one of the greatest exemplars of that tradition. In a century of Romantic Tyrants pursuing a range of totalitarianisms, he was an old fashioned enlightened despot who built the forms of a representative democracy that did eventually follow him. He was allowed to do this because his ruined country provided him with an opportunity. As Rahm Emanuel once put it, you should never let a good crisis go to waste. This man certainly did not.