Suzy Hansen, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, spent a decade reporting from a single Istanbul neighborhood, and uses it here as a window onto a city, a country, and a world in upheaval. Karagümrük, once dominated by Ottoman-era houses, is now known for petty crime, cheap apartment blocks, and an influx of Syrian refugees. It is here that Hansen went looking for the truth behind the authoritarian turn of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and behind the broader regional crisis in which Turkey is enmeshed. Rather than reporting from the halls of power, Hansen embeds herself in the life of the neighborhood and its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or elected neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist of Erdoğan's Islamist nationalist AK Party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail. Through their lives and quarrels she connects the small dramas of the street to the large forces reshaping Turkey, the Middle East, and the world, capturing a decade of change in microcosm. Hansen's guiding questions run throughout: Is Turkey a harbinger of the authoritarianism rising elsewhere, or does the texture of ordinary life in Karagümrük tell a more complicated story? An American who has lived abroad for years, she writes with an outsider's attentiveness and a reporter's patience, allowing understanding to accumulate slowly through relationships built over time. The result is an intimate, ground-level account of how global forces—migration, populism, economic pressure—are experienced by people living through them, and a meditation on a world that feels increasingly out of joint.