by Peter Balakian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2003
Thoroughly convincing—and one more reason for the governments of the West, including the Clinton administration, to be...
An eloquent account of Turkey’s long campaign to rid itself of Armenians—and far longer campaign to disavow any responsibility for crimes against humanity.
During the 1890s, writes memoirist (Black Dog of Fate, 1997) and poet Balakian, Sultan Abdul Hamid II launched a campaign of extermination against Armenia’s Christians, killing about 200,000 in a two-year period and setting “the template for most of the genocide that followed in the twentieth century.” The Ottoman Empire’s resorting to state-sponsored murder against the Armenians was not without precedent; a few years earlier, the same sultan had ordered the massacre of thousands of Bulgarians who had been pressing for independence. Yet this crime was unprovoked, and it outraged the world; in the US, millions of dollars were raised for Armenian relief, and at the turn of the century nearly every American schoolchild could find Armenia on the map. The fall of the Ottomans and the rise of the Young Turks brought further troubles for the Armenians, for whereas the Ottomans had ruled a multiethnic empire, the Ataturk regime championed Turkish nationalism. Faced with revolutionary movements in the Balkans, the Young Turks justified oppression of the Armenians as a measure to stave off a two-front attack; “in the Turkish mind,” writes Balakian, “the struggle to keep the Balkans was never far from the Armenian Question.” This time the death toll was far higher; Balakian estimates that between 1.2 and 1.3 million Armenians were killed in the years between 1915 and 1922, though some historians put the figure at 1.5 million. Again, writes Balakian, American sentiment was with the Armenians, many survivors among whom emigrated to the US. But in the years since, despite the Turkish government’s crimes against its people, the Armenian genocide has been gone unacknowledged, the product of a “sinister . . . Turkish campaign of denial . . . that is perhaps singular in the annals of history”—a campaign that, Balakian says, successfully persuaded Bill Clinton to kill a House measure to commemorate the genocide “for the sake of ‘national security.’ ”
Thoroughly convincing—and one more reason for the governments of the West, including the Clinton administration, to be ashamed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019840-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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