PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... represents the perfect union of these two poles of his career — a largely internationalist history of what is often seen as a local even ... With a pulsating narrative — dizzying for some perhaps, not enough for others — Mazower’s book sends us scrambling up mountain ascents, slogging down into the valleys and paddling onto craggy island coasts as Greeks of all stripes, mercenaries and commoners, nuns and priests, fought for \'freedom or death\' against a depleted Ottoman Army ... This thick book is a long journey, rich with social history and the luminaries of the age. It is hard to imagine it being surpassed any time soon as the definitive English-language account of the Greek Revolution ... Still, it leaves much unsaid. Offering a history of the Greek Revolution without a deep accounting of the Ottoman imperial system — its role in producing the revolution and its reactions to it — is a significant omission (and never mind the fact that many Greeks remained in the Ottoman Empire after Greek independence). In Mazower’s story, as in so many others of the Greek Revolution, the Ottoman Turks appear one-dimensional, presented mostly as perpetrators. To be sure, Mazower is attentive enough to occasionally show them as victims too. But along with the Greeks, Albanians, Arabs, Serbs and many others, the Turks were major creators of a system that produced centuries of intercultural coexistence ... In the end, The Greek Revolution causes us to think more deeply about the role of the nation-state in a global context.
