Black Dog Fate Peter Balakian

ReviewThe author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poetical and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey. He is shadowed by his relatives’ cautiously 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 inheritance and to scathingly indict the political forces that conspired to sweep beneath the rug the 20th century’s introductory genocide.

From School Library JournalA poetic reminiscence of growing up in the ’60s takes a sharp turn as the author discovers and explores his family’s painful memories of the Armenian genocide in the early years of this century.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library JournalIn this remarkable memoir, teacher and poetical Balakian (Colgate Univ.; Dyer’s Thistle, LJ 2/1/96) recounts his experiences growing up in suburban New Jersey amid a family of 1915 Armenian genocide survivors. The tensions of the old-world ways vs. the new causes more than the frequent teenage angst for Balakian. He tells of family gatherings, replete with the delicious smells and tastes of native dishes and with heated discussions of creative writing of recognized artisti value and the troubles of suburban America?but not of his relatives’ past in Armenia. He gradually breaks through this silence, however, and learns the horror of their treatment at the hands of the Turks, a revelation that has profoundly influenced his life and poetry. Balakian writes with power and poignancy, confronting his past with justified outrage and transforming that outrage into art. An special work; strongly commended for all libraries.?Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Most helpful client reviews

39 of 41 persons found the following review helpful.
Beautifully told
By methylethel
This is a beautifully written book– a lyrical nostalgia for 1950s suburb life haunted by the invisible presence of an Armenian family’s violent past. Balakian has worked magic with this mingling of personal and historical narrative. He does falter a bit in the last couple of chapters, getting a tad preachy when the narrative speaks utterly well for itself, but that’s forgivable.

Read it because it’s a lovely memoir. Read it because it’s a slice of history your social studies curriculum in all probability left out. Or just read it.

41 of 44 persons found the following review helpful.
riveting and devasting
By David W. Lee
This book is when it comes to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenian Turks for the duration of World War I. It is also regarding an Armenian-American’s search for his family’s past, and his present identity as viewed through one of the most horrific events of world history, an event made even more unimaginable by the fact that it occurred for the duration of the twentieth century.

Mr. Balakian’s prose overwhelms without being self-pitying or maudlin. I may still smell and taste of walnut and lemon in an Amenian-American household in the 1950′s, juxtaposed with the life of a boy who is living beneath the cloud of the horror of what happened to his ancestor in Turkey in 1917, before he became conscious of what genuinely occurred.

This book left me reeling and lowspirited for days. It is a book that will have to be read.

David W. Lee leelawok@mmcable.com

30 of 31 persons found the following review helpful.
Eye-opening saga of an Armenian-American
By A
My boyfriend is Armenian and once noted the genocide that took place in April, 1915. I had no idea what he was referring to and was embarrassed at my lack of education…

Since America has decisive to ignore the Armenian disaster in all of it is history books, I took it upon myself to become more educated on these events and portion what happened with every one I know. I purchased this book to learn more when it comes to the Armenian culture through the eyes of someone who was also just beginning to learn with regards to his own culture as he grew up in America. I found that Peter Balakian’s book was one of the most eye-opening, identifiable stories of Armenian history. Even his descriptions of the respective Armenian foods made my mouth water and my stomach pain with hunger.

My mother and father (who are German and Filipino) are now reading this story as well. We oftentimes comment on how shocked and astonished we are at how such tragic events happened to the Armenian people and which went totally unpunished, much less acknowledged, by world leaders and historians to date. It’s perfectly shameless that Turkey would go on the record as having refused that such a genocide even took place. The resulting evil effects of the Armenian massacre have been felt global allround a good deal of generations. Hitler himself once stated in a speech on August 22, 1939, “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians…” He said this in preparation for the invasion of Poland and he subsequently planned to use the Armenian genocide as a model for his Jewish concentration camps, expecting that the world would ignore his actions just as it ignored the massacre versus the Armenians.

Buy this book and educate yourself when it comes to a big piece of history that will have to never be forgotten. You won’t be disappointed.

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