Turkish Kaleidoscope

"When Jenny White arrived in Turkey in 1975 to pursue a master's degree in Ankara, she had no idea that the country and her university were already embroiled in a vicious civil war. She learned quickly. In the simple everyday act of attending class, she encountered armed personnel carriers, bullets, bombs, and other dangers. By the time she left in 1978, the polarized fury of street violence between groups professing "leftist" and "rightist" views had enveloped the entire country. Trust broke down between citizens, and tolerance for thinking or behaving differently vanished. Agreement with and obedience to the leader of one's faction were paramount. It was not a time that allowed for complexity or nuance. Based on the author's personal experiences and her in-depth oral history interviews with older Turks who lived through that tumultuous period -- and informed by her years of ethnographic research in that country -- this graphic narrative book explores the origins of political factionalism and its descent into violence in 1970s Turkey, up until the 1980 coup. White's four main characters are fictional creations inspired by dozens of real people who participated in the fury of that period. They include leftists as well as rightists, men and women who, for various, conflicted reasons, joined extremist factions and took part in political violence. Through these vivid, real life stories of these characters' struggles to find their own paths through the thicket of ideological approaches and factions, the book offers a compelling narrative exploration of what drives people to engage in acts of political violence, at great personal cost to themselves and their families, at the behest of an autocratic leader. Jenny White's book also explores what motivates individuals in these situations to endanger themselves anew in order to break away from the extremist factions that have consumed their lives"--