cover image Black Sea

Black Sea

Neal Ascherson, Neil Ascherson. Hill & Wang, $23 (305pp) ISBN 978-0-8090-3043-9

If Ascherson (The Polish August) cannot pinpoint precisely where Xenophon's 10,000 soldiers were when, lost on the march home from Persia 2600 years ago, they saw the sea and thought they were home, there is little else he does not tell us in this exotic and seductive history of the Black Sea. From his tales of its peculiar composition--in the depths beneath its upper stream of living water, it is the world's largest dead sea--to those of the myriad of peoples who have inhabited its coasts throughout time, his stories seem more fabulous than the Arabian Nights. Ascherson tells of obscure tribes, familiar heroes, lost languages, current politics and ancient hostilities as poisonous as the depths of the Black Sea itself. Around the once ``monstrously abundant'' Black Sea, peoples who disliked each other lived together, at best uneasily, at worst at war: Goths, Romans, Germans, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Russians, Persians, Asians and others. ``My sense of Black Sea life,'' concludes Ascherson, ``a sad one, is that latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal... not a helpful model for the `multi-ethnic society' of our hopes and dreams.'' (Oct.)