Word: persia
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...without good reason that Sultan Selim I of the Ottoman Empire, dope addict though he was, was called The Inflexible, and never did he have greater need of his stubbornness than when he marched on Persia. For 116 days the wily Shah of Persia dodged and retreated, laying waste the land as he did. But finally the two hosts met near the town of Caldiran in what is now eastern Turkey. The Ottoman army had guns, the Persians did not; and at the end of that battle in 1514, 25,000 Persian horsemen lay dead. For the Shah, the defeat...
Turkish literature, little of which has ever penetrated to the U.S., has always been derivative. For hundreds of years, Turkish poets imitated those of Persia; in the 19th and 20th centuries, the model has been France. This lively first novel skillfully blends both traditions with a strong individualistic note of its own and suggests that U.S. readers may have been missing something. Beautifully translated by Edouard Roditi, the book tells the story of young Memed who grows up in a mud-walled village hut in a remote province of Anatolia. Recklessly brave and a deadly marksman, Memed battles his environment...
This book is low comedy as well as reporting of a very high order. Like most true comedy, it is also edged with sadness, but every page bears the mark of truth and is as unfailingly readable as first-rate fiction. Author Doris Lessing was born in Persia of British parents, grew up in Southern Rhodesia; in 1949, when she was 30, with a two-year-old son and a near-empty purse, she set out to discover the land of her fathers. Already a very good writer (The Grass Is Singing), she wanted to meet men and women...
...calls her latest autobiographical book a "papyrus from a pyramid," and though it is not fiction, Shadows in the Grass is almost as remote as the medieval Persia and 19th century Italy in which Author Dinesen has sometimes set her tales. In Shadows, she reminisces about the decade (1921-31) when she ran a coffee plantation in the Ngong hill country of Kenya, an Africa now dead beyond recall and yet startlingly alive in these recollections. Characteristically, her theme -the relation of master and servant-would embarrass many contemporary writers to the roots of their social consciousness, but from...
...courting gift for a Dhagestan maiden was a dozen or so severed male right hands, strung on a thong. Imaginative bloodletting was much admired; Afghanistan's rulers executed prisoners by tying them across the muzzles of cannon (until Western diplomats complained of flying flesh) and the Shah of Persia delightedly invented another sort of extinction: extracting the teeth and hammering them into the skull...