In his book, Tuncay Birkan scans newspapers and magazines published between 1930 and 1960, and by traveling between the lines that remained unpublished and unread, he reveals the attitudes of writers such as Refik Halid, Peyami Safa, Halide Edip, Necip Fazıl, Nahid Sırrı, Nurullah Ataç and Sabiha Sertel towards the state and the market in the early Republican period.

He reminds us that these people, who "in literature, art, science and thought, even if they started from false or incomplete premises, tried to establish something, to make what was established more humane, and who genuinely loved their country", had "reactions, desires, dreams, convictions, ideas and social loyalties too complex to be relegated to the level of extras of the main actor called the 'Unionist-Kemalist mentality', which until yesterday claimed to be the sole ruler of the country".

"The past is not a static and complete picture of facts, but a moving picture that includes both facts and interpretations of facts, that constantly changes as it is viewed from certain perspectives, by emphasizing certain value judgments, and that can never be complete because it is always faded and erased somewhere. The same goes for the heritage we inherit from the past." Birkan aims to "shake the hegemony of totalitarian perspectives that petrify our view of the past and see there only a uniform barrenness, a gigantic desert" and "provoke in new generations of readers the desire to find the seeds of a heritage that can be cultivated from our own painful and bleak history."