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(Follow the links to Amazon.com, where you'll find a fuller description and can buy if you wish.)
I recommend the colorful and attractive DK Eyewitness Travel Guides to Turkey and Istanbul because they are easy and fun to use. They give you a brief introduction , with lots of pictures and diagrams, without a lot of details. They don't cover everything we visit, but they are a good start. And they'll stimulate your curiosity about things we can't fit into our trip.
Among the other popular guides, Lonely Planet Turkey and Istanbul and the Insight Guide have good reviews; Frommers, newly published does not seem well received, and the highly detailed standard for travel guides, the venerable Blue Guide, is out of print, acquired by a new company, and the promised "new and improved" version is not yet available.
An extremely good guidebook for our “pilgrimage” purposes is Anna G. Edmonds, Turkey’s Religious Sites. Although it’s very well written and illustrated, it’s very expense (for a relatively small book), and almost unavailable in the USA. It’s published in Turkey, but I haven’t seen it a lot even there. If you find it, buy it – it may be your very best souvenir. Even so, expect to pay $30-40 for it.
There are a couple of others that concentrate on Biblical sites: Blake & Edmonds, Biblical Sites in Turkey, and Fant & Reddish, A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey. In my opinion, the newer Fant & Reddish is much better.
Turkish Odyssey: A Cultural Guide to Turkey is also quite good, In fact, I'd recommend this book as your next best bet after the DK Eyewitness Guides. (It also includes an informative and entertaining interactive CD-rom for Windows.)
A very nice, compact introduction that touches bases of both geography and history is Richard Stoneman, A Traveller’s History of Turkey, about $15. (In spite of its lousy reviews, I enjoyed the book!)
If you actually can use it to memorize common words and key phrases, Just Enough Turkish seems very nice. (I tend not to find language phrase books helpful.)
For Byzantine/Eastern Orthodox history and background, two very different and very accessible books:
Mary Cunningham, Faith in the Byzantine World, Inter Varsity Press, $14. (If you have liimited time and energy, this is the one to get for a brief and well-illustrated introduction.)
Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, about $15. (Get this one if you'd like to explore Eastern Christianity in a little more depth. This is one of the most well-written, clear and conscise works of prose I have ever encountered. A joy to read.)
The more I read and study and discuss Islam, the harder I find it to recommend a book or a source that can give a contemporary Catholic beginner a really useful understanding of Islam. Part of the reason is that Islam itself has a unifying core of belief and practice, and yet many variants, some of them dating almost back to the time of Muhammad himself. Fortunately, a Catholic deacon from Rochester, NY, an active participant in CAtholic-Muslim dialogue for many years, has provided us with a roadmap for beginning to understand Muslims and their Islamic world:
George Dardess, Meeting Islam: A Guide for Christians, $17. If you read nothing else on Islam, read this. He's also published an excellent sequel, Do we Worship the Same God?: Comparing the Bible and the Qur'an. Both of these books give us a very personal journal rather than an objective treatment.
If I had to pick just one of the "popular" books to recommend today (tomorrow it could be different), it would be:
Christine Huda Dodge, The Everything Understanding Islam Book, $15. It looks a lot like one of the "Idiots" or "Dummies" book, and has pretty much the same popular approach. The difference is in the writer: she's an American Muslim convert, who has been involved in communications. Apart from being a good writer, I think her perspective as a modern American Muslim woman is what makes the difference.
In addition:
Yahiya Emerick, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam, $19. It's also written by an American Muslim convert who betrays a real lack of understanding of the Christianity he came from--sort of lke the evangelical convert who proudly proclaims he "used to be Catholic but now is Christian." He seems to be writing more to convince than to inform. On the other hand, he writes clearly and and
On the other side, Malcolm CLark, Islam for Dummies, $22, is by a Christian retired professor of religious studies. It's written from the perspective of a "sympathetic outsider," which I think is what we'd want, but it impresses me as a bit dry and complex. It's OK if the "dummies" are college students!
(You might want to read the Amazon.com customer reviews on all of these and make up your own mind.)
For the most part, however, I think time (and money) would be best spent examining the material to be found on the internet—there’s really a lot of unique and excellent stuff, FREE! Follow the links in the “itinerary” page of our website: www.olaclaremont.org/ecw. Wikipedia is also especially helpful; just type whatever you're looking for in the "search" box."
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