An intimate history of the front: masculinity, sexuality, and German soldiers in the First World War
Together both books from Akcam and Rogan add greatly to the literature on the First World War in the Middle East and make excellent resources for scholars and students albeit at different audiences and levels of subject expertise. Akcam's book requires a great deal of background knowledge if the reader is to fully contextualize the mass of primary material and as such is suited more to a specialist readership. By contrast, Rogan has produced a classic that will appeal to a popular audience as much as to an academic one and he deserves great credit for raising public awareness of the impact that the war had on the Middle East. Moreover, Rogan's conclusion, that 'in the Middle East, more than any other part of the world, the legacies of the Great War continue to be felt down to the present day' (406) ensures that both his and Akcam's works should remain required reading both for scholars and for policy makers seeking an in depth understanding of how the boundaries of the modern Middle East came into being during an earlier period of intense region wide upheaval. Finally, in calling for an end to the misrepresentation of historical record, Akcam ends on a hopeful note that 'the powerful, recent surge of democratization in Turkey has paved the way for such recognition' of the Armenian genocide (452) Unfortunately, such a hopeful concluding sentence reflects more the political atmosphere in Turkey in 2012, the year his book came out, and readers may judge that the recent (re)growth of political authoritarianism in Turkey will once again restrict the room for debate on such emotive and highly charged issues. For this reason, among others, historians will be grateful to Akcam for mining the Ottoman era archives in such meticulous detail in case Turkish governments choose to close off similar access to scholars in the future and particularly if state society relations once again begin to fray in the modern republic.