Bir Ömür Nasıl Yaşanır

İlber Ortaylı is Turkey's best-known living historian — an Ottomanist who reads a famously large number of languages and became an unlikely popular figure through television and lectures. This is not a history book. It is closer to advice, gathered from a life spent reading: how to learn a language, what travel is actually for, why curiosity has to be cultivated rather than waited for, how to choose what to read.

It sold enormously in Turkey. The tone is the appeal and also the objection — direct, certain, occasionally severe, with the manner of a professor who is not especially interested in whether you agree. Depending on the reader that lands as bracing or as lecturing.