Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past - Softcover

Balakian, Peter

4.21

1,676 ratings by Goodreads

9780767902540: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767902548 ISBN 13: 9780767902540

Publisher: Broadway, 1998

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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia and immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced--the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915, including many of Balakian's relatives, in the century's first genocide.

In elegant, moving prose, Black Dog of Fate charts Balakian's growth and personal awakening to the facts of his family's history and the horrifying aftermath of the Turkish government's continued campaign to cover up one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity. In unearthing the secrets of a family's past and how they affect its present, Black Dog of Fate gives fresh meaning to the story of what it means to be an American.

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Review:

The author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poet and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey. He is shadowed by his relatives' carefully guarded memories of past trauma: the brutal Turkish extermination in 1915 of more than a million Armenians, including most of his maternal grandmother's family. Balakian seamlessly interweaves personal and historical material to depict one young man's reclamation of his heritage and to scathingly indict the political forces that conspired to sweep under the rug the 20th century's first genocide.

From the Publisher:

One of the Los Angeles Times "Best Books of 1997"

"All the best memoirs belong to the literature of quest....Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate is such a book."
--Houston Chronicle

"Written with great sensitivity, Black Dog of Fate is at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, and the story of a young man's passage into adulthood....A fascinating and affecting memoir."
--New York Times Book Review

"A landmark chapter in the literature of witness. . . . Out of silence he has crafted something new."
--Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review

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