This Is Not Civilization - 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

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.

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

Edition details

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