ANDREW MANGO, Atatürk—The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (London: John Murray, 1999; Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000). Pp. 687. $40.00 cloth.

Extract

This is the best biography to date of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Kemal co-founded the Turkish Republic in 1923 and was its first president until his death in 1938 at age 58. Mango writes that Kemal “believed that the struggle for genuine independence should be waged by each nation for itself in the name of an overarching secular ideal of progress common to all. . . . His aim was not imitation but participation in a universal civilization” (p. xi). Kemal's views derived from those of late Ottoman ideologues—notably Namık Kemal and Ziya Gökalp (authors of significant studies that are not in Mango's bibliography, which, in this reviewer's opinion, would have enhanced his fine work). Kemal was “[a]bove all . . . a builder, the greatest nation-builder of modern times,” writes Mango on the first page of his engagingly written, well-documented book. He concludes that “Atatürk was a competent commander, a shrewd politician, a statesman of supreme realism. But above all he was a man of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment was not made by saints” (p. 528).