Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation

The acknowledgements show how the book was made. Kinross was admitted to the presidential archive at Çankaya, helped by Professor Enver Ziya Karal of Ankara University, and allowed to use the papers of Sir Horace Rumbold, British ambassador in Istanbul. He also spoke with dozens of people who had known Atatürk personally, such as Kazım Özalp and Fuat Köprülü. This gives the book a rare liveliness: events are built not only from documents but also from witnesses' memories.

The preface is a portrait in itself. Atatürk is described as someone who «did not fit the usual Turkish type»: fair, high-cheekboned, with steel-blue eyes. He took care over his clothes, talked with friends late into the night, and sometimes took decisions about running the country at the dinner table. The author sees a politician who «reached liberal ends by illiberal means», who read people unerringly and knew when to persuade and when to intimidate. His quip about İsmet İnönü is here too: «Fifty foxes chase each other in his belly, but none ever catches another's tail».

Chapter one takes the reader to late nineteenth-century Macedonia, where Muslims, Christians and Jews, Turks, Greeks, Slavs, Vlachs and Albanians lived side by side. Mustafa, born in Salonica in 1881, was the son of Ali Rıza Efendi, a customs official who went into the timber trade, and Zübeyde Hanım, a devout woman who wanted her son to become a hafız. The parents' quarrel ends in a comic compromise: the boy is sent with ceremony to the neighbourhood religious school, then quietly moved to the modern Şemsi Efendi school. At the religious school little Mustafa refuses to write cross-legged on the floor and tells the teacher, «Yes, I am defying you», and the whole class backs him.

The most moving pages are the years of poverty. The father loses his money in the salt trade, falls ill and dies. The mother takes the children to her brother's farm near Salonica. Mustafa and his sister Makbule chase crows away from the beans and roast chestnuts by the fire on winter nights. The author writes that perhaps for the first time Mustafa felt a love of land and nature, but soon grew bored because he wanted to learn. His envy of a neighbour's boy strutting in a military-school uniform would decide his future.

The second half of the chapter moves to the Monastir military high school. Here the teenage Mustafa Kemal sees Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian bands trying to tear Rumelia apart. In the 1897 war he tries to run off to the front as a volunteer with a friend but is sent back. The poet Ömer Naci introduces him to literature, and Ali Fethi to French and to philosophers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. The author does not hide the Salonica taverns, the dance lessons or the reply «I am going to be someone important». The chapter ends with his admission to the War College in Istanbul in 1899.

The first pages of chapter two describe turn-of-the-century Istanbul as two separate cities: north of the Golden Horn the bright, Europeanised Pera of the Christians, to the south the crumbling old city of the Muslims. Thanks to the capitulations all the wealth is in foreign hands, and Turks feel like captives in their own country. The young Mustafa Kemal is lonely at first, then befriends Ali Fuat and finds a father's affection in the home of Fuat's father, İsmail Fazıl Pasha. Under Abdülhamid's regime of spies he reads banned French books and Namık Kemal secretly at night.

• Prose that flows like a novel, blending documents with witnesses' memories
• A structure that runs the great historical backdrop (the Ottoman collapse) alongside the personal story
• A portrait that shows its hero's weaknesses but remains broadly sympathetic
• A chapter layout that clearly marks the major turning points