Stamboul Ghosts: A Stroll Through Bohemian Istanbul - Hardcover

John Freely

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0956594883 ISBN 13: 9780956594884

Publisher: Cornucopia Books, 2018

Synopsis

The Irish-American physicist, academic and traveller John Freely wrote more than sixty lively books on travel, history and science before he died in 2017, aged 90. But It was Istanbul, where he emigrated with his family in 1960 to take up a post teaching physics at the American Robert College, that turned him into a writer. His first book, 'Strolling Through Istanbul' - written with his fellow academic Hilary Sumner-Boyd - was an instant success when it was published in 1972 and has never been out of print since. With the exception of Oguz, so thin that he was known as The Ghost because he barely cast a shadow, everyone in John Freely's rumbustious memoir, including the author himself, is larger than life. Bohemian Istanbul was a haven for myriad misfits who found their feet in the city. Clamorous, glamorous, eccentric, cosmopolitan and frequently outrageous, they included the 'berserker' Peter Pfeiffer, a resourceful exile with three passports; Aliye Berger, the beautiful queen of bohemian Pera; the writer James Baldwin and, fleetingly, the future Pope John XXIII. This elegy for a lost world encapsulates the flavour of their daily life and nightly excesses. Well lubricated with lemon vodka and Hill Cocktails served by Sumner-Boyd's gloomy housekeeper, 'Monik Depressive', the Freely crowd weave their way from the Galatasaray fish market and the taverns of Cicek Pasaji to the Russian restaurant Rejans, and frequently on to the Freely household on the Bosphorus hills, where a party will soon be in full swing and eggnog flowing freely. 'Stamboul Ghosts' is lllustrated with Ara Guler's poignant black-and-white photographs, which make of Freely's beloved city an evocative stage-set.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Brooklyn, New York, of Irish parents, John Freely (1926-2017) was brought up in New York City and Inch on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland. A lifelong traveller, he had crossed the Atlantic four times by the time he was six. He enlisted in the US Navy at seventeen in 1944, serving on missions in India and China, and married Dolores (`Toots') Stanley on being demobbed after the war. He received a doctorate in nuclear physics from New York University and did postdoctoral work at All Souls College, Oxford. He moved to Istanbul with his family to take up a teaching post in 1960 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. Physicist, teacher and author of more than sixty books of travel, history and science, most famously the guidebook Strolling Through Istanbul, he was a noted raconteur as well as writer, with a prodigious memory for poetry and song as well as facts and dates.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornucopia Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0956594883
• ISBN 13: 9780956594884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144