Using the Pera Palace (a special locality in a special metropolis), Charles King uses the hotel as a focus for an exploration of the birth of modern Istanbul. He tells a tale well and is an adept manager of tangents. The hotel is fascinating in its own regard, but as a mechanism to draw together the disparate tales of individuals and movements that came together during this hinge time in Turkish history, the author brings unique colour and atmosphere to the telling. Ripe with factoids and with special stories that draw the reader into a place in both geography and time, King delivers engagement and elucidation in quell measure and moves beyond something that could have been dry chronology into a spellbinding tapestry.