Reviews

• This book is highly intelligent and well deserves all the praises it can amass, what a very good read, an excellent book from beginning to end !

• A fabulously interesting book. I love this region’s culture and history and I found this a fascinating and thought provoking read on identity and culture.

• This is a remarkable book & reads like a story of the Black Sea region. It starts with the geography of the area & gradually flowers into a convergence of geography, history, biographies & almost everything concerning the location. I experienced a whirlwind yet comprehensive journey. The narrative style easily juxtapositions ancient & modern seamlessly & effortlessly & all the pieces fit together. There is a fine insight into the complex mind of the migrant & identity when the 1990s migration of Pontic Greeks to Greece is described : “on the one hand they had opted for Greece as home, but then – as soon as they had disembarked in the promised land – they began to weave together a wonderful, exotic bower of special tradition & private destiny which suggests that their home is, after all, entirely elsewhere”. Perhaps, one can explode this universally to all migrations. Not a moment of boredom & a substantial boost to my awareness of this region. As gripping as a novel, yet useful for both, the academic & also the general reader. An immensely fulfilling read! Such reading experiences are rare. The chronology at the end extends good support to the rest of the work. Lastly, I must confess I sought some assistance from internet maps & wish the book had been better illustrated. (I am a general reader & bibliophile)

• I consider this as a companion to the massive and brilliant 750 page tome on the Mediterranean and its peoples I am currently reading by David Abulafia The Great Sea but it is written in a lighter and more easily read prose ... but none the less scholarly... because of Neal Ascherson's journalistic phrasing. You would not find the expression "muddy-arsed squireens" (p.231) used by many historians and it is Ascherson's human touch that makes this book such an enjoyable read. Both books are histories back to the time of Herodotus, and both are concerned with the anthropology of the settlers of these seas but while Abulafia covers the whole of those great seas that make up the "Med", Ascherson concentrates his 300 pages on just the one. But the Black Sea has had more head-spinning confusions, churnings and population waves that a washing machine! From early Greek, Iranian and Viking settlers through pogroms, communism and collapse to our modern concerns with the dangerous ecological threat this region has experienced constant - and for readers - fascinating turmoil. Neal Ascherson is an author with a strong background career grounded in journalism and gives us, in this book, an eminently readable and very personal (his own father as a Royal Naval midshipman in 1920 saw the Russian fleet withdrawing) account of the trials and churning of the peoples of this region in their struggle and search for homeland and identify. I was recently (2012) in Ukraine and saw some of this whirlpool and that obviously added to my personal enjoyment of this work which is thoroughly recommended for those readers who enjoy history in a very readable form.

• A trip around history, culture, and science of an important region by a charming polymath.

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