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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Deeply serious yet often very funny, intellectually rigorous yet so personally revealing you may occasionally flinch, Pamuk's is the rare volume that keeps you spellbound right up to the perfect, brutal hammer stroke of the last sentence.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Noel Malcolm
This evocative book succeeds at both its tasks. It is one of the most touching childhood memoirs I have read in a very long time; and it makes me yearn - more than any glossy tourist brochure could possibly do - to be once again in Istanbul.
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Outstanding
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The Spectator Philip Mansel
[A] magnificent memoir.
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Nicholas Birch
The tour on offer here, dazzling though it is, is not so much of Istanbul as of Pamuk's efforts to mould it into a personal vision.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Michael Frank
He fails to differentiate telling moments from trivial ones and illuminating memories from the merely remembered. That said, "Istanbul" is a rich and quirkily faceted portrait. [7 Aug 2005]
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Favorable
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The Guardian Jan Morris
This is an irresistibly seductive book, and its seduction lies not in the author's self-portrait, but in his poetical identification with Istanbul.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Christopher de Bellaigue
Pamuk's achievement in ''Istanbul'' is to show the human damage done by Ataturk's revolution without succumbing to the benighted nostalgia of many Turkish Islamists.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers. [18 Apr 2005, p.54]
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Sandip Roy
Even if you didn't know Orhan Pamuk as the author of acclaimed novels such as "Snow," even if you had no familiarity with Istanbul as a city, Pamuk's memoir, "Istanbul: Memories and the City," would still be a fascinating literary adventure.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
An engrossing tale of a city--and of an author as a young man. [1 Apr 2005, p.405]
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Favorable
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Washington Post Alberto Manguel
This is the tense in which his book seems to be written, in a voice on the edge of reality, halfway between what he knows has happened and what he believes imaginatively to be true. This voice, this tone, this tense, is perfectly suited to describing melancholy.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Byron Ayanoglu
Istanbul is highly worth reading for the pleasure (and the pain) of the sublimely beautiful images from a forgotten time. [2 Jul 2005, p.D5]
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Elif Shafak
This is a masculinized, rationalized account of Istanbul that excludes the voices and stories that fall beyond this scope, including countercultures, women, folk Islam, and superstitions, all of which are crucial to Istanbul and have generated a restless urban dynamism.
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Mixed
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Library Journal Mari Flynn
Fans of Pamuk and his work will enjoy the well-written accounts of his eccentric upbringing, but others might find the multitude of reminiscences distracting. It is the city that is most intriguing. [15 May 2005, p.137]
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph David Flusfeder
Fans of Pamuk's fiction will be grateful for this book; travellers familiar with Istanbul will be stimulated; those unfamiliar with either may well be wearied.
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Mixed
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The Economist
Istanbul today is nothing like the place Mr Pamuk sketches. But then maybe it never was.
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