Book summary

This history of the Armenian Genocide--the massacres of the 1890s and in 1915 by the Ottoman Turks--extends its reach, relating how the humanitarian impulses that were then an important part of America's growing internationalism came to the aid of the Armenians. Thanks to the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities, many individual Americans, outraged and sympathetic, substantially contributed to improving the lot of refugees and survivors. The Armenian Genocide has many parallels with the Jewish Holocaust, and this book seeks to enlighten people as to its enormity, and to the lack of action that was taken in the West to stop it. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

Media reviews

"[T]he book's real power derives from the eyewitness accounts of the genocide itself. The sheer volume of outsiders' testimony that Balakian compiles, and the horrifying similarity of their observations of men, women and children beaten, tortured, burned to death in churches or sent out into the desert to starve, is an overwhelmingly convincing retort to genocide deniers."