Lords of the Horizons

A History of the Ottoman Empire

By: Jason Goodwin

Narrated by: Grahame Edwards

The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts. For over 600 years the empire swelled and declined, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled over the Danube and the Euphrates with the richest court in Europe. But its decline was prodigious, protracted and total.

©1998 Jason Goodwin (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Great summary but no chronological narrative

This is a great book for anybody looking for a moderate, not deep, dive into one of the most interesting empires in world history. It's goal is not a year to year narrative of the empire's history, but a broad description of the rise and fall of the House of Osmanoglu. For a few key events, like the Sieges of Constantinople and Vienna, there is a more detailed, traditional history is told.

Occasional mispronunciation but otherwise a satisfying performance by the voice actor.

Excellent Story - Poor Reading

The complexity of the Ottoman history screams through the narrative. Alas, the somnambulant performance needs to be endured to hear it. The story of bridging the civilizations of the East and West, existing from middle-ages to the 20th Century. The process of blending the mores, laws and cultures of diverse tribes and peoples across vast territories encompassing Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Eastern Latin Empire and Turkey [Anatolia]. The Ottoman's provided a foundation for the growth of knowledge, medicine and economics. They expanded to the west while keeping Mongol influence at bay in the east. A must read/listen for someone interested in how we arrived at today.

Beautifully written

Copious descriptive language and a pleasant narration made this book a delight to listen to. Good summary of Ottoman History for the casual listener.

Good introduction to the Ottomans, bad narration

This is a book with a terrible narrator. I must say Im not very picky about narrators, but this is a very extreme case, as the voice is not only terribly slow and flat but also sometimes hard to understand. This is especially bad in the first hour.
As I'm very interested in the subject, I soldiered on and got through the end, the narrator got better, but never really good. If you can stand the defective narration there is a very interesting book here, as the history of the Ottoman Empire is both fascinating and crucial as we are talking about one of the biggest empires in the world from the 15th century onwards. Its an epic story which encompasses the history of Europe in the fateful clashes of the Turks with the West, and the history of the Ottomans is crucial to understand the modern world today from the Balkans to the Middle East to the North of Africa to Russia and World War I.
The book is well written and stylish. However, it is also somewhat haphazard in its structure. The writer is not a professional historian but a fiction writer, so sometimes the writing is a little more impressionistic. Also the book is chronological, but the writer chooses his chapter by subject or by theme, and then in the same chapter he flashes back and forward through time so the order of events is not always clear, and sometimes the book is more poetic than thorough. To go deeper this book in audio form should need to be at least 20 hours as the history of the Ottoman encompasses so many centuries and territories. Sample the audio before buying to see if you can tolerate the narrator, and if you do you will have a decent, but not definitive history of the Ottoman Empire.

I Wish I Could Say I Liked This More Than I Did...

I wish I could say I liked this book morr than I did. Jason Goodwin provides a comprehensive survey of the Ottoman Empire, and for the lay reader, it strikes just about the right level of detail, and fills in enough background to orient the reader to a world very different from our own. That said, it reads more like a series of essays than a book, with numerous repetitions and strange ellipses. Oddly, some repetitions occur within the same chapter, suggesting that some of the fault lies in the editing. Further, while narrator Grahame Edwards has an excellent voice, and conveys the text well, his reading is filled with mispronunciations, generally transpositions,such as "Trezibond" for "Trebizond."

Incredible

I love it incredible way of writing makes it so easy to see everything in your head

Bad performance of a meandering book

The performance of the book is mushy, the writing wanders from narrative to sociological. Weak.

Mediocre history and terrible reading!

Ottoman history is fascinating. Jason Goodman is a story teller but not a serious historian. His novels are excellent but his "Lords of Horizon" is a narratively good only that he makes it so complicated that leaves the reader/listener confused. Even for a well versed in Ottoman history, his narrative jump around so much that there is no order either according to the functional topics or chronology.
As for the narration of Grahame Edwards, I wish there was a reader who actually can do a descent job in pronouncing the Turkish words better. Not a single person-name, place name or any word of Turkish being pronounced correctly. It makes it even more confusing when the esteemed reader pronounces the same word differently in different parts of the book, that makes it ridiculous. Overall, I would not recommend this book either for reading or listening. There are much superior books on the subject/

A bunch of episodes

Like a bunch of images. The story is not organized by narrative nor time… performance is so monotonic and repetitive. All names and concepts are misread, it takes considerable effort to connect the names and concepts with the original Turkish/Arabic ones. The author jumps back and forth in time. I did not like the book. Some of the scenes described are interesting, but the rest is badly made…