Turkey and America: East & West - Where the Twain Meet

This book is a synthesis of the author’s now lifetime of deep and abiding personal and professional experiences that have led to his deep understanding of the American Experience, the Mediterranean World, and U.S.-Turkish relations. The narrative guides the audience to bridges, where others may see only chasms. Oh, there are chasms for sure. The reader is transported, back and forth, from East to West, across the centuries, juxtaposing geography and discovery, politics and war, religion and the arts, terrorism, key figures and human triumphs. The goal of the journey is a better appreciation for the nature of both historic and current controversies and under-recognized extraordinary contributions that lie at the heart of the East-West dynamic. This book seeks to decode some of the presumptions and misconceptions that tend to become the prisms through which both individual and state perceptions are filtered and pose as the truth . These truths, like beauty, tend to vary in the eyes of the beholder.