advent of the settler state of Israel to the flourishing of an acclaimed inter- national communist poet; and from the development of one of the largest business tycoons in Greece to the making of the global revolutionary movement of Trotskyism and even the transformation of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli into Pope John XXIII. Consisting of seventeen partly chronological but primarily thematic chapters, which are accompanied by photos from the mid-twentieth century by the famous Turkish photographer Selahattin Giz, Midnight at the Pera Palace is a long, well written, and informative—albeit selective—account of Istanbul’s messy transition from Ottoman to republican times. For urban historians of Istanbul, the author hints at several key methodological questions, in addition to presenting a vast array of anecdotes excavated from a dizzying array of primary and secondary sources. Nonetheless, readers looking for an urban history of “the birth of modern Istanbul” should be warned that they may find less Istanbul than they would expect as they travel extensively alongside the characters to whom King gives central stage. K. Mehmet Kentel University of Washington doi:10.1017/npt.2017.35 Sinan Yıldırmaz. Politics and the Peasantry in Post-War Turkey: Social History, Culture and Modernization. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017, x + 294 pages. The Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) period between 1950 and 1960 is arguably the most controversial and least studied period of modern Turkish history. Scholarly study of the period has been significantly influenced by dichotomous views that remain quite dominant at the popular and political levels even today. The DP’s takeover of power in 1950 is seen either as a counterrevolution as a result of which the most valuable achievements of the single-party period of 1923 to 1945, such as secularism, were reversed, or else as a popular uprising in which the authentic spokespeople of the will of the nation finally replaced the republican elites. Calling this dichotomy a “perception rupture,” in this book, which is pri- marily a study of peasants, Sinan Yıldırmaz avoids this problem via meticulous analysis of the existing scholarship and data. His decision to extend the period NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 150 Book Reviews use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/npt.2017.35 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. La Trobe University, on 12 Nov 2017 at 08:27:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of