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Summary: Oustanding Book - and an anecdote -
Review: This book was very informative, and for a history book extremely easy to read. Even though I knew how it would end, I found myself hoping against hope that some fate other than the one that befell those poor Armenians would unfold. Mr Balakian must be a beautiful person and filled with great strength to be able to write such a deeply moving book about such a dark topic that has so tragically affected his own personal family. Last year my husband and I traveled to eastern Turkey, at the time we were only somewhat familiar with the Armenian Genocide. We arrived in Moush and began trying to travel, photograph and explore the unbelievably beautiful, seemingly empty coutryside. ... Despite obvious attempts by Turkey to try and erase the Armenian presence in the areas of eastern Turkey that we visted, everywhere we turned we saw the thumb-print of the Armenians. It's a beautiful land over there and one can't help but feel that the land feels orphaned. I highly recomend The Burning Tigris, it will make you cry at times, and at times make you appreciate your family more than ever.
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Summary: Very good book
Review: a very well writen book about one of the most tragic events of recorded history...shows that man, no matter how "civilized" is an animal. I strongly recomend this to anyone who wants more information on this topic....i find it very funny that this murat character who gave this book a 1 rating is even alowed to reveiw a book. He has not read this book yet he is stateing opinions. Just click on his name and you will see for yourself that he has only given out 1 ratings and only to books that denounce turky
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Summary: Turkish Denial of Armenian Genocide
Review: "Reviews" by Turks, such as from Murat Yenilmez, complete with inaccuracies such as the archives being open for all historians, are understandable when, one considers what they have been taught as history. The children and the grand-children of those that committed the crimes listed in Peter Balakian, grew up believing that the Turks are a super race. Every schoolchild recited the Oath of Allegiance each school day, saying " I am a Turk!, I am rightous, industrious....I hold my nation above all (sounds a little like 'Deutchland uber alles', does'nt it)" and finished by saying " let my existence be sacrificed to the Turkish existence." With these kind of preparation, is it a surprise that Turks deny the reality of the genocide their grandfathers committed? Peter Balakian's book will never convince Turks of their past crimes: not his text nor the pictures. Nothing short of a Time Machine that can transport them to 1915 will convince the Turks.
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Summary: Armenian American
Review: I would suggest this book to anyone who is interested in the events of 1915. especially if anyone has previously heard about the Armenian genocide. I have not personally read it, and therefore cannot comments on the specifics of the books, but my family has, and from what they tell me, it is worth the money to buy, and the time to read. thank you -Sarkis
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Summary: FULL HATRED...
Review: THERE IS NO SINGLE EVIDENCE WHICH WRITER CAN PUT AS HARD-EVIDENCE JUST RUMOURS AND ENGLISH LIES. ALL ARMENIANS WHO HAS FILLED WITH HATRED TOWARDS TURKISH PEOPLE TRYING TO ACCUSE OF A COUNTRY AND A NATION FOR 80 YEARS. DESPITE OF ALL ARCHIEVES OPENED TO THE ALL HISTORIANS IN TURKEY NO ARMENIAN HISTORIAN WISHED TO COME AND CHECK. NOTHING MENTIONED ABOUT ARMENIANS COLLOBRATION WITH IMPERIAL RUSSIAN ARMY DURING WAR AND CAUSED 1 MILLION TURKS KILLINGS. NOTHING MENTIONED ABOUT BRUTAL TASHNAK GANG WHO HAS KILLED AND RAPED THOUSANDS OF TURKS IN EAST OF TURKEY DURING RUSSIAN INVASION. HYPOCRISY IS ALL ABOUT OF ARMENIAN TACTICS. IT WILL BE ALWAYS SAME MY
ISTANBUL
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Summary: Extremely stirring and incredibly informative.
Review: I just finished reading this remarkably well written, accessible book on the Armenian Genocide. What happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915 is one of the great hidden crimes in the history of the world. When I think back to all the lessons I had about World War One - from high school through college - I cannot remember even once covering this horrible chapter of The First World War - let alone studying it in the kind of detail it truly deserves. Within the span of a couple of years, the crumbling Ottoman Turkish government under the careful direction of Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha completely destroyed an ancient, three thousand year old culture. Mr. Balakian has written a poetic and haunting - yet hard to put down - expose on not only the horrific nature of the crime, and how the Nazis would use the Turkish paradigm as a template 25 years later against the Jews, but also on America's response then and now. In addition, Mr. Balakian discusses why Turkey and the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were never punished, the determined ongoing attempts by Turkey to re-write history and the influence of such revisionism upon current world events. Most disturbing for me was not only the one and a half million murders described by Balakian as he deliberately moves from one burned-out ancient Armenian village to another, but the bizarre perverted pleasure that the Turkish army seems to have taken in stealing young Armenian children and torturing them and the magnitude of the raping of Armenian women. After reading this book one almost wishes we had invaded Turkey instead of Iraq. It is difficult to imagine the hundreds of thousands of Armenian bodies still lying in hidden mass-graves all over Turkey and equally difficult as an American to understand, why, as the most powerful nation, the United States does not hold Turkey accountable for their crimes-against-humanity and for openly digging up these graves. Another very important aspect of the Armenian Genocide touched upon by the author are the thousands of ancient Armenian churches, graveyards and monuments that were destroyed in an effort by successive Turkish governments to hide all evidence that Armenians had ever lived in eastern Anatolia. This book was recommended to me by an historian friend who is a tenured professor of history at a local university, it is gripping, stirring, informative and extremely sad at times, and it reads like a novel. It should be required reading for every high school student when World War One is being discussed.
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Summary: Raising a Red Flag on a Hidden and Submerged Atrocity
Review: We live in fragile times: while we look to other countries and shudder at the famine, mass deaths, suicide bombings, the ever bubbling curse of AIDS, we also sit and watch highschool killing sprees, 911 reactions, serial rapists and killers on the television nightly news and on the front pages of the following morning's papers. We cannot avoid being aware of atrocities that surround our tiny planet. One particular atrocity of the past is retold in frequent books, movies, musical elegies, paintings, poems, and theater - that incredible crime against humanity being the Holocaust of Hitler's Nazi Germany. But how many of us are aware of the magnitude of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians that took place in 1915? Or of the massacre of Armenians in the 1890's that became an American focus for humanitarian concerns, advancing Clara Barton and the Red Cross into action with all the backing of the press and religious support that was readily mustered? The time has come to set the record straight on this submerged tragedy in hopes that bringing attention to this omission from American history books will alert the people of the world (and especially America) just how powerful our government's preoccupation with OIL and the countries that supply truly is. Peter Balakian has written the definitive book THE BURNING TIGRIS: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE - A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes and I would urge everyone to read this enormously well researched, documented, and readable volume. Balakian starts his history with the early 1890's and traces the ever-increasing degradation of Armenians in Turkey by the Ottoman Empire. The strangest aspect of this ongoing murder of innocents is that for many years it was a cause celebre in the USA. The Women's Rights Movement led by such luminaries as Grace Kimball, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Alice Stone Blackwell gave of their time, money and personal commitment to send relief to the Armenians and to keep the tragedy before the public eye. Great thinkers and writers of the day like William M. Ramsey wrote " Turkish massacre...does not mean that thousands are killed in a few days by the sword, the torture, or the fire. It does not mean merely that everything [the Armenians] possess is stolen, their houses and shops looted and often burned, every article worth a halfpenny taken, the corpses stripped. It does not mean merely that the survivors are left penniless - without food, sometimes literally stark naked...Sometimes, when the Turks have been specially merciful, they have offered their victims an escape from death by accepting Mohammedanism." Yet this massacre was only a prelude to the Genocide that occurred in 1915. The real horror of this history is the absolute drive of the Turks toward annihilation of the Armenians in 1914 - 1915. This genocide was a mirror image of the Nazi Final Solution for Jews in WW II complete with ghettos, mass murders, camps, slaughter of all men below age 50, then mass slaughter of the women and children. A particularly heinous note is that the Turks identified, isolated and then exterminated most of the great philophers, teachers,artists, writers, and thinkers - leaving few to transmit the horror of the genocide to the future generations. But despite the initial care and concern of the USA in sending aid to the Armenians and accepting thousands into the country here, the actual events of treaty signing, accords, agreements, and political stands at the close of WW I and WW II focused on the need to pacify Turkey in order to keep the flow of OIL Almighty flowing. The embarrassment of this lack of courage to punish violations of Human Rights is now felt acutely as we are left to view our country's errors in Vietnam, the Middle East, our own 'ethnic cleansing' of the American Indians and our history of supporting slavery of the African Americans. Where in 1915 the New York Times wrote daily about the Armenian atrocities, equating the words 'Armenia' with 'atrocities', 'massacre', deportaion', 'outrage', 'race extermination', when it came time in 1918 for President Wilson to revitalize the need to bring justice to the Armenian human rights violations by declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, he elected instead to ignore history and make the table of negotiation safe for Turkey. Balakian is careful to footnote and give direct evidence for every statement he makes, harsh though they may be to read. In his Epilogue he quotes Judith Herman: "Criminal behavior is always defined by the perpetrator's compulsion to 'promote forgetting' ". For this reader the might and power of this book is summarized by this quotation. Balakian is careful to concede that men like Presidents Carter and Clinton have made public statements in support of keeping the Armenian Genocide by the Turks in the public eye. It has not been enough. With this book perhaps we as a nation will read and hear about one of the greatest tragedies of history - and one of the most ignored. Highly Recommended for students, for historians, and for everyone who believes in Human Rights.
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Summary: How soon we forget the real first 20th century holocaust
Review: It does not in any way diminish the sheer horror of the holocaust against the Jews to say that the Turks did exactly the same to the Armenians only a few decades before - and with far less international condemnation. The Armenian massacres were the first genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, call it what you will - and it is great that the truth about these barbaric events are now coming to the fore. Buy this book, give it to your friends and get involved in telling people about the hidden massacre of the 20th century. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)
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Summary: Sad Book
Review: I am a 71 year-old Turkish-American and I was born in Gazi-Aintep in 1932 (formerly known as just Aintab.) My family, grandparents and all, moved to the United States in 1945 after World War Two, when I was just 13 years old. I was raised and educated in the United States. I graduated from university in 1955 with a degree in physics. I read Professor Balakian's moving book and I could not put it down and I could not stop crying. My grandfather served under Djevdet Bey throughout World War One. My grandfather died in 1961 at the age of eighty years old. Our family used to have many Armenian friends in Aintab, we used to love our Armenian friends because they were the most beautiful peaceful people. We always valued education and always valued truth. This is very difficult to say, but after reading Professor Balakian's stirring book I feel compelled. My grandfather was a good man who in his youth was caught up in an evil situation. As we knew him he was a very sad docile man, he was filled with such guilt that he would often go days - even weeks - without sleeping or eating. He committed unspeakable war crimes during World War One. He committed great crimes against humanity, he was a rapist and a murderer, he shot old women and children, and he was responsible for the tearing down of many ancient Armenian monuments and churches at Van. When my brother and I were old enough to understand he told us of his youth every day of his life until he died, he told us about Djevdet Bey and what a psychopath he was, and he taught us to never fear the truth. My grandfather was a good man, at the end he had a good heart, but the fact remains that he was one of the butchers that professor Balakian writes about, and I just wanted to say to all of my Armenian friends out there that I am sorry for what my grandfather and my country did to your people and your culture. I am especially sorry for the acts of my grandfather, I am sorry that we tore down your churches and burned your homes, I am sorry for my country's dishonesty, but there is a large group of Turkish people out here (especially Turkish Americans) who do not deny the truth of what happened in 1915. Please do not hate us all, if it was in my power I would give back all that my immediate family was responsible for taking away. This is really all I had to say, this is really all, just a simple apology. I know it is not enough, in fact I know it is nothing. I highly recommend The Burning Tigris, it was very well written and a very sad book for me.
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Summary: It made me weep
Review: and it made me proud to learn of America's first international human rights endeavor and the many acts of altruism carried out by State Department officials as well as by grassroots Americana -- from Sunday schoolers to Clara Barton and more --to save Armenian lives during the tragedy of the horrific Armenian Genocide. From the opening sentence one can see Balakian writes with a poet's eye but his heart and soul belong to historical witness and testimony. This scrupulously researched and detailed account will not disappoint and will keep readers turning pages. Finally a clear concise eloquent historical narrative of the 20th century's first genocide.
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