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The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe Audiobook
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Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year
From one of our leading historians, the definitive history of the Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence was an unlikely cause, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it, as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan.
Mazower does full justice to the more complicated reality on the ground, as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory fora completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in its sentiments, and radical in its goals. The Greek War of Independence was the first war in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.
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"On the bicentennial of the Greek revolution, a prominent scholar tracks the historical detail and enormous international significance of the improbable, largely grassroots uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Mazower, a Columbia professor and winner of the Wolfson Prize for History who has written extensively about Greece and the Balkans, ably ties together the many disparate threads of this complex history of Greek independence. . . . An elucidating history that is relevant to understanding the geopolitics of Greece today . . . [The Greek Revolution] will prove indispensable to scholars."
— Kirkus
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[A] pulsating narrative . . . rich with social history and the luminaries of the age . . . The Greek Revolution causes us to think more deeply about the role of the nation-state in a global context. . . . It is hard to imagine it being surpassed any time soon as the definitive English-language account of the Greek Revolution.
— New York Times Book Review -
[A] superb new history of the rebellion and its broader implications. . . . A compelling story—full of conflicting characters, rivalries, massacres, betrayals, enslavements—all of which [Mazower] narrates with earned authority and exceptional power. . . . He achieves more clarity on this tangled subject than other historians in English have managed before.
— Wall Street Journal -
[A] rich, illuminating, and imposing history of [a] paradigm-shifting conflict . . . . An expert storyteller, Mazower unravels a Gordian knot of local, regional, and international factionalisms.
— Claire Messud, Harper's -
[A]n engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis.
— Financial Times -
Elegant and rigorous . . . [The Greek Revolution] holds lessons for modern geopolitics: about the galvanising effects of violence, the role of foreign intervention and the design flaws in dreams.
— The Economist -
Mazower tells the story as it always needed to be told. . . . The Greek Revolution offers the best and fullest explanation, to date, for a series of events whose effects would change the entire geopolitics of Europe. Written with compassion and understanding for the human cost of that achievement, it deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come.
— The Times Literary Supplement -
Mazower contextualizes a major transformation in 19th-century Eastern Europe for readers of European history and provides a solid background of modern Greece for students of ancient history.
— Library Journal -
Broad in scope and colorful in detail, this is a masterful portrait of a historic watershed. . . . [A] sweeping history of Greece’s 1821 war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. [Mazower] recounts the revolution’s inception among Greek emigrés with an idealistic dream of Hellenic nationalism and its actuality as a murky, eight-year struggle fought mainly by peasants and warlords who were motivated less by patriotism than by religious hatred of Muslims, factional vendettas, and mercenary self-interest . . . [A] lucid, elegantly written, and often gripping account.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
Mazower has constructed out of all this [new research] an epic narrative, both scholarly, breathlessly page-turning and packed with hauntingly romantic characters. Few historians dig so deep or with such sympathy into what history felt like to those living through it.
— The Tablet
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About John Lee
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.