If you're looking for a good starting history of the Ottoman Empire - this isn't it. Lords of the Horizon is a dense travelogue-type book that wanders through the 600-odd years of the history of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a puppet show and ends with the removal of the wild dogs of Istanbul, and in between is organized in chapters based on some characteristic of Ottoman life. Reading it is like looking through a telescope - you know you're seeing something, but you don't know exactly what it is, and rarely have any context for what you're seeing.
The principal problem I have with the book is the writing. Goodwin makes extensive use of metaphor, but often his metaphors are unreadable, so that you have no clue what he means to convey. In other words, you have to decipher the metaphor or comment to know what happened, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, and frequently, you just can't. I am reasonably well-read, and I couldn't tell what many of his allusions were meant to convey.
But more troubling was the difficulty of deciphering what even ordinary sentences meant. Since there is no narrative to help carry you through less-than-clear sentences, I frequently (and by that I meant virtually every page) had to stop and retrace my steps through a sentence to locate the subject or verb or direct object. I could tell what had happened, but not to whom. And if the sentence contained one of the aforementioned metaphors, all I could tell is that something had happened, but not whether it was good or bad, expected or unexpected.
This isn't always the case, of course. When Goodwin lets himself tell a story - the siege of Vienna for example - the imagery contributes to the story. There are good word sketches of the people and the scene. But this may also have been because I already knew the scene, through Tim Powers' (admittedly twisted) version of the siege in The Drawing of the Dark. But my intent was to get a short, basic history of the Ottoman Empire to bring my knowledge of the environs of Istanbul up to date from the fall to the Romaian Empire to Mehmet in 1453 to the creation of the Turkish state by Mustafa Kemal after World War I. But the description of the origins of the Ottoman state was better (or at least more clearly) told in 1453, and comparing this narrative of the history to 1453 to that book, I prefer that one. The character of the pivotal figure of Mehmet the Conquerer was clearer there, at least as far as it went.
Now this may all make a lot better sense after I have a historical framework to hang it on, in the same way that extensive reading I've done on Greek culture built on a foundation of a basic understanding of the history and origins of the culture. And based on the reviews I've seen of this book, I am clearly in the minority in thinking it was damn near unreadable, but at the moment, it's like dessert before dinner. It was just too much too soon. But it may make a lot more sense after reading, say Lord Kinross' book. I just needed a framework before you start slicing and dicing dates, people and events the way Goodwin does.