![]() ![]() ![]() not a helpful model for the `multi-ethnic society' of our hopes and dreams.'' (Oct. ``My sense of Black Sea life,'' concludes Ascherson, ``a sad one, is that latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal. Around the once ``monstrously abundant'' Black Sea, peoples who disliked each other lived together, at best uneasily, at worst at war: Goths, Romans, Germans, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Russians, Persians, Asians and others. ![]() The Black Sea, known as Pontus Euxinus or hospitable sea in ancient times, connects Europe to Asia and laps the shoreline of seven countries, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, and Abkhazia. Ascherson tells of obscure tribes, familiar heroes, lost languages, current politics and ancient hostilities as poisonous as the depths of the Black Sea itself. Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), ix, 306 pp. From his tales of its peculiar composition-in the depths beneath its upper stream of living water, it is the world's largest dead sea-to those of the myriad of peoples who have inhabited its coasts throughout time, his stories seem more fabulous than the Arabian Nights. If Ascherson (The Polish August) cannot pinpoint precisely where Xenophon's 10,000 soldiers were when, lost on the march home from Persia 2600 years ago, they saw the sea and thought they were home, there is little else he does not tell us in this exotic and seductive history of the Black Sea. ![]()
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