The relaunched National Geographic Traveler guidebooks are in tune with the growing trend toward experiential travel, providing more insider tips and expert advice for a more authentic, cultural experience of each destination. These books serve discerning, curious travelers and supply information and interpretation not available on the Internet. In response to the interests of today's traveler, the acclaimed National Geographic Traveler series includes exciting new editorial features, a contemporary redesign, and inviting new covers.

Istanbul – Kushta – Constantinople presents twelve studies that draw on contemporary life narratives that shed light on little explored aspects of nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. As a broad category of personal writing that goes beyond the traditional confines of the autobiography, life narratives range from memoirs, letters, reports, travelogues and descriptions of daily life in the city and its different neighborhoods. By focusing on individual experiences and perspectives, life narratives allow the historian to transcend rigid political narratives and to recover lost voices, especially of those underrepresented groups, including women and members of non-Muslim communities. The studies of this volume focus on a variety of narratives produced by Muslim and Christian women, by non-Muslims and Muslims, as well as by natives and outsiders alike. They dispel European Orientalist stereotypes and cross class divides and ethnic identities. Travel accounts of outsiders provide us with valuable observations of daily life in the city that residents often overlooked.

Nearly 29 years have passed since the EC and Thrkey forged the Association Agreement on 12.3.63. After abrief period on hold, Thrkish-EC relations regained dynamism when Thrkey applied for full membership on April 14, 1987. The view of the EC Commission, as presented some two and a half years later to the Council of Ministers, was approved by EC Foreign Ministers. The response stated that the EC would not start negotiations for membership until the completion of the Single Market. The main points of the Commission's observation focused on the discrepancy in the levels of economic development between Turkey and the EC, the issue of human rights, shortcomings in social security and the question of Cyprus. This response was a source of great disappoinment in Thrkey; because it had been a consistent ally of the West until then, taken important steps towards democracy and a free-market economy, EC membership, as Thrkey saw it, was to be its reward.

The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably the father of modern Turkey. He was also the architect of the Armenian Genocide, which would result in the systematic extermination of more than a million people, and which set the stage for a century that would witness atrocities on a scale never imagined. Here is the first biography in English of the revolutionary figure who not only prepared the way for Ataturk and the founding of the republic in 1923, but who shaped the modern world as well. In this explosive book, Hans-Lukas Kieser provides a mesmerizing portrait of a man who maintained power through a potent blend of the new Turkish ethno-nationalism, the political Islam of former Sultan Abdulhamid II, and a readiness to employ radical "solutions" and violence. From Talaat's role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his exile from Turkey and assassination--a sensation in Weimar Germany--Kieser restores the Ottoman drama to the heart of world events. He shows how Talaat wielded far more power than previously realized, making him the de facto ruler of the empire. He brings wartime Istanbul vividly to life as a thriving diplomatic hub, and reveals how Talaat's cataclysmic actions would reverberate across the twentieth century. In this major work of scholarship, Kieser tells the story of the brilliant and merciless politician who stood at the twilight of empire and the dawn of the age of genocide.