The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response - Hardcover

Balakian, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060198400 ISBN 13: 9780060198404

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2003

Synopsis

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.

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

During the United States' ascension in the global arena at the turn of the twentieth century, America's humanitarian movement for Armenia was an important part of the rising nation's first epoch of internationalism. Intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens came together to try to save the Armenians. The Burning Tigris reconstructs this landmark American cause that was spearheaded by the passionate commitments and commentaries of a remarkable cast of public figures, including Julia Ward Howe, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Stone Blackwell, Stephen Crane, and Ezra Pound, as well as courageous missionaries, diplomats, and relief workers who recorded their eyewitness accounts and often risked their lives in the killing fields of Armenia.

The crisis of the "starving Armenians" was so embedded in American popular culture that, in an age when a loaf of bread cost a nickel, the American people sent more than $100 million in aid through the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities and its successor, Near East Relief. In 1915 alone, the New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian Genocide.

Theodore Roosevelt called the extermination of the Armenians "the greatest crime of the war." But in the turmoil following World War I, it was a crime that went largely unpunished. In depicting the 1919 Ottoman court-martial trials, Balakian reveals the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide confessing their guilt -- an astonishing fact given the Turkish government's continued denial of the Genocide.

After World War I, U.S. oil interests in the Middle East steered America away from the course it had pursued for four decades. As Balakian eloquently points out, America's struggle between human rights and national self-interest -- a pattern that would be repeated again and again -- resonates powerfully today. In crucial ways, America's involvement with the Armenian Genocide is a paradigm for the modern age.

About this title

Review:

"Richly imagined and carefully documented." -- The New Yorker

"[An] engrossing and poignant memoir." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] fascinating and affecting memoir." -- New York Times Book Review

"A mighty work, a slow burn of muted eloquence, dense with scholarship...compelling."--Forward

"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

"[A] fascinating and affecting memoir."--New York Times Book Review

"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

"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

"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

"In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy."--Booklist

About the Author:

Peter Balakian teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060198400
• ISBN 13: 9780060198404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512