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Peter Balakian
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The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response Paperback – October 5, 2004

by Peter Balakian (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 217 ratings
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A History of International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes

In this national bestseller, the critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.

Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly book on genocide by the Institute for Genocide Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center.

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  1. Print length
    528 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    October 5, 2004
  4. Dimensions
    5.31 x 1.19 x 8 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0060558709
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0060558703
  7. Lexile measure
    1400L
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy.” — Booklist

The terrible fate of the Armenians... is brilliantly described. A great service to the history of the Armenians.” — Sir Martin Gilbert, author of The Righteous: the Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

“An eloquent account of Turkey’s long campaign to rid itself of Armenians....Thoroughly convincing.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Peter Balakian tells the powerful and largely unknown story of [Armenian Genocide]. This important and compelling book is long overdue.” — Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D., Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Director, Emory University

“The Burning Tigris is an act of acute historical memory, of personal testimony, of prophetic witness - and of high art.” — James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword and Secret Father

“A gripping treatment of the official Turkish mass murder...a masterpiece of moral history...it needs to be widely read.” — Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

“Balakian tells a story long ripe for the telling.... He writes with grace and power.” — Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, The University of Chicago, author of Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World

“[A] fascinating and affecting memoir.” — New York Times Book Review

“Richly imagined and carefully documented.” — The New Yorker

“[An] engrossing and poignant memoir.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship...compelling.” — Forward

About the Author

Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and a New York Times Notable Book, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (October 5, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060558709
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060558703
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1400L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.19 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 217 ratings

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Peter Balakian

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
217 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Russell A. Rohde MD
5.0 out of 5 stars One Brilliant & Truly Enticing Read on Armenian Genocide
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2007
Verified Purchase
"The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response", Peter Balakian, HarperCollins, NY, 2003, ISBN 0-06-019840-0, HC 392 pgs., plus Notes 40 pgs., Biblio. 10 pgs., Index 15 pgs., 3 Maps & 15 pgs. B/W photos, etc. 9 1/4" x 6 1/4"

A brilliant, intimate narrative of multiple massacres of Armenian peoples is set forth by accomplished writer Peter Balakian, a Professor of Humanities. The book is divided into 4 parts: I Emergence of Human Rights, II Turkish Road to Genocide, III American Witess(es), & IV Failed Mission. The Epilogue "Turkish Denial...and U.S. Complicity" is especially informative & revealing of those motives behind inaction by various world powers whose true motives, eminently, the U.S., were bound up in an insatiable pursuit for stakes in oil reserves, especially those in Mesopotamia, & for military bases in the Near East, especially Turkey.

Historically, we are informed Armenia was conquered by Caesar in 63 B.C., adopted Christianity by 301 A.D., was driven into Cilicea by Seljuk Turks in 11th Century, destroyed by Muslim Mamluks in 1375 then overrun by oppressive Ottoman Turks (Muslim) in 1443 who legally designated them "infidels". The crumbling Ottoman Empire headed by the "bloody sultan" Turkish caliph Abdul Hamid II from August 31, 1876 to July 24, 1908 is credited with the "Hamidian massacres" or "holocaust" of 5,000 - 200,000 Armenians in Erzinjan. Sultan's power, assumed by nationalist "Young Turks" of the CUP, sought Muslim orthodoxy, implemented the shari'a (sacred Muslim Qu'ran law), & provoked frenzied Armenian massacres, beatings, rapes, deportations & pillaging ("continuum of destruction") in 1909 in Adana.

In aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Armenian Genocide (AG) pinnacled after the coup d-etat of Jan. 26, 1913 led by Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Jemal Pasha (Young Turk Trio) & Ziya Gokalp launching nationalistic indoctrination ("New Religion") with paramilitary training of youths, to revitalize into Golden Age as had Genghis Khan, seeking to destroy Armenians as "dangerous microbes." The brutal, gory details of bastinado, nail extraction, crucifixion, head splitting, eye gouging, mass burnings, starvations, mass drownings, rapes, etc. were carried out on CUP's killing agenda, an hierarchial command motivated by jihad that included Special Organization killing squads, Kurdish Hamidiye forces, gendarmes, & military police all used in the 1914-1915 AG when some 1,000,000. died. Final killings (6,000) were at Kars in October 1920 and in Smyrna on September 1922 by the Kemalist army. But the hatred & official Turkish denials persist, most plausibly stemming from the inhumane, replusive, ghoulish & fiendish massacres although threat of reparations including land exists.

If one were to read one book on the AG, this would be that book to choose: -- it is heavily informative, extraordinarily readable via first-person accounts with just enough repetition of different 'sources' providing supportive details as to leave a most favorable imprinting.
13 people found this helpful
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David Freydkin
5.0 out of 5 stars I give it five stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2016
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I finished The Burning Tigris three days ago. Overall, a very informative read about the Ottoman Empire's genocides on its Armenian minority, the responses of the US government and Americans, the responses of other European powers, as well as how the genocide is viewed presently. Below is a summary.

1) Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire were slaughtered both under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the late 1800s and the CUP government of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. Victims included men, women, and children.

2) The murders took place in a variety of ways. Citizens were slaughtered by Ottoman troops as well as Kurdish gangs. Many more were forced on mass transits from their homes in eastern Turkey to present day Syria whether by train or foot and died along the way. Men were often drafted into labor battalions of the Ottoman army and killed while "serving."

3) The governments of Britain, France, the US, and Russia did little to nothing to save the Armenians.

4) There was a substantial presence of American Protestant missionaries in Ottoman Turkey at the time who did much to save and shelter the victims. However, these missionaries opposed a declaration of war on Ottoman Turkey by the US due to fear of losing their property there.

5) President Woodrow Wilson, who was in debilitating health and likely influenced by missionary friends, did not declare war on Ottoman Turkey.

6) Largely due to Turkey's strategic location and influence in the oil-rich middle east, most countries do not recognize the massacres of millions of Armenians as genocide.

Less than 30 countries worldwide recognize the Armenian Genocide. The ones that do are mainly either in Europe or South America.
28 people found this helpful
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Ignotus
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2006
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Even though I posted my review once on another Genocide related article, I just couldn't resist posting it here. Sorry for the inconvenience..

To the Turkish "review"ers:

This is the case always when any is published about any subject that bears the name Armenia. Armenia is "fake, bandit, criminal, murderous, genocidal" and the list goes on and on... I again ask objectively and scholarly as to where, when, how, who, why are these people charged with these heavy charges, when it was the OTTOMAN EMPIRE which ruled for over 630 years, over the known Christian world, from the doors of Vienna to the shores of Yemen, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black sea shores and Persia. During that period how many millions of Christians were forcefully converted to Islam, tortured, massacred, brutalized, their properties, wives and daughters confiscated and dishonored, and also how many wars did it have against even Muslim powers like the Persian Kingdom, the Berbers, the Albanians, the Kurds and Arabs?

Sure, it is easy to yeal "WE DIDN'T DO IT!" in regards to the Armenian Genocide.. Oh but hold it! Don't the Neo-Nazis say the same about the Holocaust? Don't the Khmer militia say the same about Cambodia? Don't SOME Hutus say the same about the Tutsis? DOES THE GOVERNMENT OF SUDAN OR DOES YOUR GOVERNMENT IN TURKEY OR AZERBAIJAN say there is a Genocide going on in SUDAN? (I know exactly why can't you say it). Sudan would tell you to "look into a mirror..."

Do you want just one example of Genocide commited not only against the Armenians, but against every Christian minority for 630 years? WHERE DID YOU RECRUIT THE JANISSARIES FROM...? Being christian children forcefully taken as tax from their parents and grown as turks to massacre christians is or isn't a classical, methodological, systematic way to shrink or eliminate a race? What about the 300,000 Armenians massacred by the Hamidiye forces between 1894-1896? What about the 30,000 plus Armenians butchered in Adana in 1909? What about the 1,500,000 Armenians, and more than 400,000 Greeks, 250,000 Assyrians, and thousands of other non-turkic minorities between 1915 and 1923...? Some Turkish diplomats were shot during the Cold War by Armenian activists? What a pity... 30 plus diplomats for you weigh more than millions upon millions of other people... Elif Shafak the daughter of one of those diplomats shot, is more couragous than anyone to objectively examine for the truth and getting convinced that Turkey did commit the ultimate crime against humanity, that these Armenians acted for the recognition of the Genocide (even though the ways were extreme and sometimes unjustified.) Wasn't it the interior minister of Azerbaijan who in 2005 said that "Armenia would not exist in 30 years from now..? Any better words for Genocide?

Let the honest, unbiased, historically sound minded person objectively examine the events, and come to the conclusions. Conclusions that are nowadays reached by Turkish intellectuals (Akcam, Berktay, Muge, Ertem, Zarakoglu, Shafak, and many more) who recognize and condemn the first Genocide of the 20th Century.

"NOW GO AND LOOK INTO A MIRROR..."
20 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Human bestiality
Reviewed in Canada on October 12, 2022
Verified Purchase
Interesting but shocking. Description of human bestiality. And yet, commercial interest prevailed. But should men and women pay for the crimes of their ancestors?
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2015
Verified Purchase
the first account of the mass murder of a nation by islam, read it
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Kathy K.
5.0 out of 5 stars the truth
Reviewed in Canada on April 13, 2022
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Very well prepared and accurate book. Specially those who don't believe the Genocide happened should read it.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2016
Verified Purchase
Fantastic book. Very interesting and educational.
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