A riveting personal account and vivid exploration of Armenian history diminished by prejudice.
A writer returns to the Turkish city from which his Armenian family was expelled in this final volume of a memoir trilogy.
Madenjian’s (Ravished Paradise, 2016, etc.) father, Hovsep, liked to describe Chepni, a small city in Turkey, as an “earthly paradise,” a fond label for a place from which he was summarily expelled. The author was given an opportunity in 2007 to travel there in order to see for himself the “ancestral lands” Hosvep once called home before his property was stolen and he was compelled to start a new life in Lebanon. Madenjian wrote to the mayor, Huseyin Erdal—who insisted Chepni was the “world’s most modern place”—to procure a map and prepare arrangements for a visit. He was greeted by an odd mixture of warm hospitality, curiosity, and wary suspicion by the city’s inhabitants, some of whom seemed to believe he was there looking to recapture lost property or gather witnesses. But the author’s principal motivation was to see the “Forced March to Nothingness,” the road to the desert his parents were forced to walk into exile. Displaying an impressive mastery of the genocide perpetrated in 1915, Madenjian completes the history of the Armenians’ plight in Turkey he began in the first volume of this trilogy, sometimes referencing (and reproducing) his father’s memoirs from the ’20s. The author takes readers on a historically enlightening, if embittered, search for the reasons why the Armenians, particularly his own family, were so thoroughly betrayed by their neighbors. As in the first two installments, Madenjian’s unflinching quest can be poignantly powerful. His account of Armenian suffering is as affecting as it is edifying. But also following the model of its predecessors, the book inters readers under mounds of microscopic details, an informational burial that proves exhausting. Further, his implacable rage often clouds his judgment, the result of which is indefensibly broad attacks on whole groups of people: “I would be happy if not a single Kurd remained in the world. What did they bring to humanity until now other than misery and killings?”
A riveting personal account and vivid exploration of Armenian history diminished by prejudice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Armenian History Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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