An Ongoing Affair

Authored by Heath W. Lowry, the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Professor of Ottoman Studies at Princeton, an historian who is renowned in his field and who is the author of many academic books and studies, this beautifully written and flowing book is his telling of how he became so attached to Turkey during the years he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Turkish village in the mid-1960s. Lowry¿s memoirs of his two years in Turkey surpass many other returned Peace Corps Volunteer stories, for it is both wonderfully written and honest to a fault, shedding light on both the humorous and the tragic events of those years, and becoming, in a sense, a coming-of-age story of a young man who is suddenly thrust into a very different culture. In the end, he learns the eternal story of humanity, that no matter our origins, or our religion or language, we all share the same basic values and follow the same kinds of dreams.