The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. By Partha Chatterjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 173p. $33.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. By Esra Özyürek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 227p. $74.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Few leaders have been as lionized by their people decades after their deaths or have influenced their nation's political development as much as Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the wake of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk (an honorary title meaning “father of the Turks”) led a war of national independence, established the Turkish Republic, and introduced a series of modernizing/westernizing reforms that included secularization of the state, relative emancipation of women, and westernization of the alphabet, dress, and the legal code.