Black Sea

Black Sea is a gem of a book: it is a wonderfully written, sophisticated combination of travelogue and history by a fair-minded humanist. In my opinion, it stands with Claudio Magris's Danube as among the best books of its type. If you are interested in the Black Sea, I recommend this book. Even if you're not, however, I suspect that on trying Ascherson's prose, you will be... I have given five intelligent people I know copies as presents: all have enjoyed it immensely.

Part travel book, part history, part natural history, this is a miscellany of fascinating stories about a fascinating region woven together into a single, tight narrative. There's a great deal of learning lightly worn and tremendous technical skill involved in the organization and writing. Those reviewers who criticize it for not conforming to a standard template have a point, but what they're really complaining about is its originality.

This is a bold and imaginative look at an area critical to the development of Western culture.Ascherson takes us on a remarkable tour through geography and history, and one comes away with much of the excitement of a real traveller. If the book stumbles on occasion I think it should be forgiven given the complexities that the author is willing to address (and the remarkably few stumbles that he has made. I particularly enjoyed Ascherson taking us more or less up to the present, as the spectre of modern environmental collapse joins the never-ending wars whose origins become more understandable after one has read this book. I wish it were longer, I wish there were more obvious references to take us further once we were done, but this is a real gem even if you never get east of Long Island Sound.

Ascherson's style is constantly engaging and provocative. He asks probing questions -- e.g. not only the genetic/ethnic question "who are these people?" but the often ignored further question, "who do these people think they are?". The answers diverge more often than one would expect. His coverage and command of 3000 years of jumbled ethnicities is impressive. My one complaint lies in his treatment of the point that forms his subtitle: that the Black Sea area is the "birthplace of civilization and barbarism". The essential point here is that one cannot participate in both "civilization" and "barbarism" at once. The support for this claim is not sufficient, and indeed seems to run counter to the theme of intermixture that animates the rest of the book. Nonetheless, the book is fantastic and well worth the read. We are deeply in Ascherson's debt for this wonderful work.

Read as preparation for cruise of Black Sea and found the book highly relevant and a good read. Thought clarity and usefulness would have been tremendously enhanced if Ascherson had included maps for each chapter showing locations being discussed as well as current and ancient place names.