This book is a revised version of Philipp Wirtz's 2013 PhD thesis submitted to the history department of SOAS University of London. In this clearly written and concise work, Wirtz attempts to analyse how the Ottoman Empire's final decades are remembered and described in post-Ottoman autobiographical narratives written primarily in the cultural context of the Turkish Republic, which sought to present itself as a complete break from its predecessor. To this end, Wirtz brings together and examines 17 autobiographies penned by an array of authors who were born and raised in the late Ottoman period and later became renowned writers, journalists, soldiers, and politicians. Wirtz's focus lies on the ways in which these figures from different socio-cultural backgrounds made sense of their “Ottoman years” of childhood and youth that saw numerous catastrophic events, the First World War included, overshadowing personal lives.

In addition to the introduction and conclusion, Wirtz's book consists of six chapters. The first seeks an answer to why people write down their life stories, and it focuses on the forewords and introductory parts of the autobiographies. Wirtz identifies three main motives for securing one's life story in writing. First, the urge to bear witness to past experiences for the benefit or entertainment of future generations. Second, the desire to preserve or re-evoke the scenes, persons or events the authors cherished in their past, i.e. nostalgia. Finally, the wish to correct current views of the past, circumvent the “narrative monopoly” established by the republican regime over writing about the past, and criticize the present through the lens of the past.

In the second chapter, Wirtz is concerned with the personal origins, family backgrounds, and earliest memories of autobiographers, and explores how they used these points to connect themselves to a locality, a national/ethnic group or a historical heritage, all of which constituted significant markers in personal lives in Ottoman times. The third chapter examines how childhoods were spent in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and engages with the presentation of childhood memories in post-Ottoman autobiographical narratives. In the following chapter, Wirtz turns his attention to educational experiences and analyses how schools and schooling were contextualized as part of the “past world” in which the authors grew up. Considering that the majority of the writers Wirtz examines are men and women of letters, this chapter is essential in learning how the formation of an intellectual was shaped in the late Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 5 is one of the most striking, and investigates how late Ottoman lives with differing ethnic and religious origins were affected by political upheaval, conflict and violence that left their mark on the last two decades of the empire, such as the Constitutional Revolution of 1908, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and the World War of 1914–18. Besides examining the experiences of passive observers of these events, such as children, this chapter also deals with the reminiscences of those who actively participated in the Ottoman war effort and were concerned with the wider political implications of the war and its results. Thus, Wirtz not only provides valuable insights into the effects of these turbulent years on the individual lives of ordinary people but also seeks to shed light on how the experiences of upheaval, war and loss were kept in Ottoman and Turkish public consciousness. Lastly, in chapter 6, Wirtz highlights a specialized context, that of post-Ottoman autobiography penned by Turkish and non-Turkish authors, in English, for Western audiences. This chapter considers the ways in which “Ottoman worlds” were presented to a readership that was not personally familiar with the general setting and cultural context.

Wirtz's work offers ample information about various aspects of late Ottoman social and cultural life. Through the eyes of first-hand witnesses of the period, the book provides a detailed account of late Ottoman everyday practices, childhood culture, schools and education, celebrations and ceremonies, sports, and other pastimes. However, it barely discusses how the autobiographies, as alternative historical accounts, circumvented the Kemalist “narrative monopoly” on the recent past. Although Wirtz considers this point among the foremost motives of autobiography writing, and frequently underlines that some texts he examined were mostly written as forms of “anti-narratives” or “counter-histories” intended to balance the official discourse, he does not adequately explain how the authors of these accounts reversed the so-called narrative monopoly, intervened in contemporary debates via their autobiographies, and criticized the present through the lens of the past.

To be sure, this situation largely stems from the temporal scope of Wirtz's book, which covers the period from the 1880s to the end of the First World War. Nonetheless, the inclusion of such a discussion by expanding the scope of the work to include the Turkish War of Independence of 1919–22 might have enabled Wirtz to provide deeper insights into the points mentioned earlier. This criticism notwithstanding, Philipp Wirtz's Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies: Images of a Past World helps broaden our understanding of late Ottoman social history, popular and intellectual perceptions of the late Ottoman Empire in republican Turkey, and the connections between these two periods. Considering the growing literature on those issues, recently with Christine M. Philliou's Turkey: A Past against History and Nicholas L. Danforth's forthcoming The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, one should say that Wirtz's book offers us an exciting and valuable introduction to that field.