re: #740 lawhawk

Interesting book about a little mentioned part of Turkey’s history:

Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922

In September, 1922, after the Turkish forces of Mustafa Kemal defeated a Greek army that had recklessly occupied the Anatolian city of Smyrna, members of Smyrna’s Greek, Armenian, and expatriate communities were killed, raped, and robbed. Soon, a half million people were trapped on the port’s narrow wharves, the city in flames behind them; “The streets were stacked with dead,” a British officer wrote. Milton weaves the Armenian genocide, the birth of modern Turkey, and the tragic inanities of Versailles into his story, but his focus is the destruction of the multi-ethnic, religiously diverse cosmopolis of Smyrna (now the Turkish city of Izmir). He has a tendency to idolize the Levantines, dynasties of European “merchant princes” who remained oblivious as Greeks and Turks committed atrocities closer and closer to their enclave. Milton’s more compelling hero is Asa Jennings, a five-foot-tall Y.M.C.A. administrator who, by bluffing, begging, and desperately improvising, single-handedly saved tens of thousands of lives.