It's 1914 and thirty-five-year-old British archaeologist John Sommerville has taken his inheritance and sunk it into his life's dream of uncovering the glory of the Assyrian civilization and its kings in Mesopotamia (now called Iraq). But sadly things haven't been going so well for Sommerville, he's been at it for three seasons and has almost nothing to show for his work. He has hope, but it's about to be dashed by a German...
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(4.5 stars) Mesopotamia, once the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, boasted vibrant civilizations four thousand years before the Christian Era, and the ruins of these civilizations, many of them buried for six thousand years, dot the countryside. By 1914, when this novel opens, Mesopotamia (Iraq) is being ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. Virtually every European country is in Iraq, however, waiting...
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There's a fine recent nonfiction work "Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916=1918" which provides a fascinating look at politics and duplicity in the Middle East by Britain and other world powers. Britain (and other countries) readily made promises that they never had any intention of honoring. Much of this is reflected in Unsworth's Land of Marvels. Somerville is a British...
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This is very fine historical fiction. It is very timely. Although set in the recent past, at the time of World War I in Europe, the author places readers at the heart of the Middle East, which for many is still known as the fertile crescent or the center of civilization. He expounds knowledgeably on such geographic areas as the Mesopotamian civilization (now Iraq), with extensive discussions on the origins and development...
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King oil, Iraq and the chess game of imperialistic "diplomacy." The elements may sound familiar, but author Barry Unsworth travels back to 1914 when the Ottoman Empire was in the closing act on the world stage and would soon be carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the aftermath of World War One (Iraq was created in 1920 by a League of Nations mandate and under the protection of the United Kingdom). The historical novel...
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