"He describes his travels with great humor, a crude buffoon with a good heart type of humor and thus will entertain you as he trods on many people's toes.'
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.com/2015/12/in-turkey-i-am-beautiful-brendan.htm... ( )

“Istanbul was sad but never grim,” Brendan Shanahan writes in In Turkey I am Beautiful. This is the general sentiment of his travelogue around Turkey. While he spends a lot of his time hanging around with his friends who run a carpet store in Istanbul, he does make it out to the eastern cities. He tours the usual spots—Istanbul, Antioch, Adana—but we also get urban vistas of concrete near the Soviet border, quaint villages in the Turkish countryside, dalliances with lawlessness on the Armenian border, and a serious look at the customs and traditions of the Turkish people. He reports on the struggle within most Turkish people of whether Turkey is a part of Europe or Asia. Geographically (and for the Dewey), it’s in Europe, but many Turks don’t feel European. He writes with the usual cynicism of a well-seasoned, Western travel writer, but his personal relationships with the people he tells us about round out Shanahan’s humanity and the tone of the book.

As a military dependent, our family was stationed in Turkey in the mid-1990’s and this book helped bring back a lot of memories, especially his description of Adana (the nearest big city to the air base). I remember hearing a lot about the Kurdish struggle and the growth of the PKK (a group that protests, sometimes violently, against the current government in order to further Kurdish communist aims). Being a foodie at heart, though, I found his descriptions of local delights as well as the tea to be the most evocative. If you haven’t been to Turkey, this book is a really good place to start learning about the politics and the people. If you have, then this one should work as a pleasant reminder of days past. A poignant and enjoyable book. ( )

A travel memoir that's very easy to get into: Brendan Shanahan's prose style is relaxed contemporary Australian; it feels like having a chat with a mate. His Turkey is thoroughly modern, a place in between first and third world, in between Europe and Asia, full of life yet often mysteriously bereft of local women. Shanahan spends most of his time in Istanbul hanging out with his mates in the carpet shop, occasionally telling lies and selling carpets with the best of them. For the central part of the book, he takes a trip east, visiting quaint villages, soviet style ugly concrete cities, stunning landscapes and overhyped let-downs. A very enjoyable read. ( )

As the sub-title says, this is book about "madness and chaos in a strange land". Written with obvious love and humour for Turkey and its people, this book is hilarious, poignant, and sometimes sad. This book is one of the best I have read this year. I laughed, I cried, and I could not put it down. Fabulous! ( )