This Is Not Civilization: A Novel - Hardcover

Rosenberg, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618386017 ISBN 13: 9780618386017

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Synopsis

Jeff Hartig, an American Peace Corps volunteer, and Anarbek Tashtanaliev, the owner of a Soviet cheese factory, are just a few of the disaffected characters who end up in Turkey on the eve of the 1999 earthquake, hoping to find something they cannot get at home. A first novel.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Gripping...exotic and intimate. Every line rings with authenticity, every moment breathes with love and life and heartache. A beautiful, resonant book. - Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

This novel should do for us what The Quiet American did for an earlier generation -- put into perspective Americans' well-meaning but arrogant involvement in the affairs of very different cultures. Beware: you're likely to stay up all night to finish it. --Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives

For the past twenty years, returned Peace Corps volunteers--Paul Theroux, Norman Rush, Maria Thomas, Richard Wiley et al--have won just about every major literary award in the country, and Robert Rosenberg seems destined to be a member of this distinguished group of writers. This Is Not Civilization is a wonderful first novel, full of the marvelous compressions and juxtapositions and clashes that have indeed made the world a very small place. --Bob Shacochis, winner of the National Book Award

This Is Not Civilization is a remarkable novel that illuminates the most important struggle of our times: to find a self and to find kindredness in a world where our shared humanity is often lost to the claims of our superficial differences. Robert Rosenberg has written not only a wonderfully readable work of fiction but also an important one. --Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Beautiful...Rosenberg should be thanked for his insights into Middle Eastern culture at a time when understanding of that troubled region is essential. --James Alan McPherson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

So how does first novelist Rosenberg manage to pull it off so beautifully?... A wonderful work; highly recommended. -- Library Journal, (starred review)

About the Author:

Robert Rosenberg recently finished his M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he held Maytag and Teaching-Writing fellowships. Previously he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in newly independent Kyrgyzstan. He lived there for two years, and afterward the Peace Corps awarded him a fellowship to teach on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona while he completed his master’s in education. He lived in Cibecue, a small Apache village, and as one of the four original teachers he helped establish the village’s first high school. He also founded and edited a community magazine devoted to preserving the culture of the White Mountain Apache tribe. In 1999 he took a teaching job in Istanbul, arriving there five days before the August 17 earthquake.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618386017
• ISBN 13: 9780618386017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293