It is to his credit that he devotes considerable attention to one of the most significant though forgotten groups of the Middle East: the Pontic Greeks, who for three millenniums, from before Xenophon to after World War I, lived on the Black Sea's littoral, enriching its cultural life. Ascherson to go off on several fascinating tangents. Rather than a travel book or a potted history, 'Black Sea' is an eclectic, rambling and sometimes incoherent monologue, in which a defined geographical space provides an excuse for Mr.

All this as SS units murdered tens of thousands of Tatars.

While some German units raised Tatar militias to fight pro-Soviet guerrillas left behind by the retreating Red Army, others went farther, trying to restore the Crimean Tatars as a pro-German Kulturvolk. The Nazis had three different policies for Crimea. Czarist pogroms had a Black Sea backdrop. It was near the Black Sea that the archetypal culture clash occurred, between 'civilized' European Greece and 'barbarian' Asian Persia - the classical era's analogue to the cold war. 'Like the terminal moraine of a glacier, the Black Sea shore is a place where the detritus of human migrations and invasions has been deposited for more than 4,000 years,' Neal Ascherson, a British journalist, writes in his new book, 'Black Sea.' Both the Serbs and the Croats, as well as the Black Death, had their origins here. Situated where the Middle East crosshatches with the Balkans, the Caucasus and the southern wastes of Russia, it has always had an outpost quality, its deceptively calm shores the whispery borderlands of colliding martial cultures.

The Black Sea by Neal Ascherson