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Paul Bryant's Reviews > How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
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by
The Author is Turkish and so uses her own country as the Awful Example of how democracy can be frittered away while you are watching cat videos on Instagram. Turkey is a complicated country but there is a pretty simple split between the vast Anatolian countryside and the Westernised, more affluent, more liberal, secular, less religious cities. Guess which group votes for Erdogan – that’s right.
Elections are coming up in May and as a distant observer from England I can’t see how they won’t be tossing him out on his ear – they have been suffering from over 50% inflation for over a year (it peaked at 84% in December – how do people live??) and this was all due to Erdogan’s own brilliant economic experiment – and then of course they have had this terrible earthquake; and we have all seen the footage of devastated streets where this and that building is still standing and those built later have fallen down, in spite of new strengthened regulations brought in after the last earthquake – so what has been going on?
Either of those two disasters should be enough to terminate Erdogan’s presidency but alas, for his followers they don’t matter. They see him as their champion – against the machinations of The West, and against the impieties of those subversives in Istanbul. He is their guy. He is like the (abusive) father of the nation – they just can’t imagine life without him. So they will vote for him again in May. The Polls are neck & neck between the AKP and the CHP. We will wait and see.
Ece Temelkuran’s book is simply fizzing with outrage. She scampers hectically from one topic to another – Paris Hilton, post-truth, hijab wearers, Nigel Farage and Brexit, whataboutism – it’s a farrago, she helterskelters over too many topics, covers too much ground, and gives the reader a mild migraine. We begin suffering from indignation fatigue. And this is a shame : if ever a book’s heart was in the right place this one’s is.
Two throbbing stars looking for an aspirin.
Final note - my entry for this year's award for the Most Ridiculous Blurb is the one on the front cover by some guy named Andrew Sean Greer :
Essential reading for everyone on Planet Earth
Do you have any favourite ridiculously over the top blurbs?
Elections are coming up in May and as a distant observer from England I can’t see how they won’t be tossing him out on his ear – they have been suffering from over 50% inflation for over a year (it peaked at 84% in December – how do people live??) and this was all due to Erdogan’s own brilliant economic experiment – and then of course they have had this terrible earthquake; and we have all seen the footage of devastated streets where this and that building is still standing and those built later have fallen down, in spite of new strengthened regulations brought in after the last earthquake – so what has been going on?
Either of those two disasters should be enough to terminate Erdogan’s presidency but alas, for his followers they don’t matter. They see him as their champion – against the machinations of The West, and against the impieties of those subversives in Istanbul. He is their guy. He is like the (abusive) father of the nation – they just can’t imagine life without him. So they will vote for him again in May. The Polls are neck & neck between the AKP and the CHP. We will wait and see.
Ece Temelkuran’s book is simply fizzing with outrage. She scampers hectically from one topic to another – Paris Hilton, post-truth, hijab wearers, Nigel Farage and Brexit, whataboutism – it’s a farrago, she helterskelters over too many topics, covers too much ground, and gives the reader a mild migraine. We begin suffering from indignation fatigue. And this is a shame : if ever a book’s heart was in the right place this one’s is.
Two throbbing stars looking for an aspirin.
Final note - my entry for this year's award for the Most Ridiculous Blurb is the one on the front cover by some guy named Andrew Sean Greer :
Essential reading for everyone on Planet Earth
Do you have any favourite ridiculously over the top blurbs?
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ha, blurbing yourself, there should be a name for that. The 100 Years blurb is the father of the Greer one, I agree. If we take Kennedy literally we would first of all need to ensure the entire human race is literate. That's not a bad ambition. But to then expect them to launch into a complex modernist classic like 100 Years might be asking a bit much.
Not really what you have in mind, but from my video store days, this was a genuine blurb:"If you see only one movie this year, make it Frankenhooker."
-Bill Murray
One that has alway stuck with me is a blurb by some anonymous reviewer of the Los Angeles Times, about Toni Morrisons's Beloved: "I can't imagine American literature without it. Without 'Beloved', our imagination of the nations's self has a hole in it big enough to die from." Those are pretty big words.
Ece talks about AKP distributing pasta, hence the (ignorant, pitiful and economically deprived) population vote for them. Well, great formula you've discovered, Ece. However I don't understand, why this equilibrium does not work at the south east, then? Ece, do you think Kurds don't like spaghetti and they don't vote for AKP because they want lahmacun? Since the author has solved the mystery behind the success of AKP, I would suggest opposition parties to distribute rice! Sure, the results will be very different, right.
Sigh...
my favorite blurb is definitely when Derrida blurbed a book on himself (Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida): "This work is altogether first rate. It is informative, faithful, rigorous and completely original in its problematization. It is an original theoretical advance which I believe will mark an essential step forward in the field." The field of . . . himself? lol