FROM:

Black Dog of Fate is a classic masterpiece!... If you are Armenian, or if you know any Armenian people and would like to understand their past better, or if you simply are interested in the history of the Middle East in general or genocide in particular, then you will learn a lot from this book.

Peter Balakian is a true Azad Adzvadzazeen!... "a free man of God" - and a poet of magnificent proportions. He writes like an artist, not a scholar! Nevertheless, he is a great scholar and researcher, otherwise he would never have been able to write this great book. This book reads like a novel. As soon as you begin to read it, you will not be able to put it down. Your eyes will be closing, and you'll say to yourself:"Just one more page; just one more chapter." ... It's that great! I read this book in three days, finding it to be one of the most captivating books I have ever read. It does for the Armenian people what ELENI (the book by Nicholas Gage) did for the Greek people. It helps the world to better understand their suffering at the hands of the Turks.

FROM: The Aeolian Kid TO: All Amazon.com Readers DATE: 7-27-1999, 4:33 PM ITEM: Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

Dear Reader,

Black Dog of Fate is a classic masterpiece!... If you are Armenian, or if you know any Armenian people and would like to understand their past better, or if you simply are interested in the history of the Middle East in general or genocide in particular, then you will learn a lot from this book.

Peter Balakian is a true Azad Adzvadzazeen!... "a free man of God" - and a poet of magnificent proportions. He writes like an artist, not a scholar! Nevertheless, he is a great scholar and researcher, otherwise he would never have been able to write this great book. This book reads like a novel. As soon as you begin to read it, you will not be able to put it down. Your eyes will be closing, and you'll say to yourself:"Just one more page; just one more chapter." ... It's that great! I read this book in three days, finding it to be one of the most captivating books I have ever read. It does for the Armenian people what ELENI (the book by Nicholas Gage) did for the Greek people. It helps the world to better understand their suffering at the hands of the Turks. Peter Balakian has done a great service to his ancestors and his people, both the living and the dead.

I am a graduate (doctoral) history student at UCLA specializing in the Ottoman Empire, Russian history and Armenian history and I recently read this beautifully written memoir. I am neither Armenian nor am I Turkish, but after having read almost everything there is to read on the subject of the Armenian genocide, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that a well organized vicious campain of genocide to exterminate the Armenians of eastern Anatolia took place under the direction of Taalat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Djemal Bey, Dr. Nazim, Dr. Bhaeddin Shakir, and the rest of the Young Turk (CUP) leaders. Professor Balakian has written a stirring book that very accurately coincides with what actually happened. The Turkish army not only murdered Armenians but virtually all Christians - Greeks, Assyrians etc. - within the crumbling Empire. The Ottoman Army also tore down thousands of ancient Greek and Armenian churches, graveyards and monuments (accurate estimates place the total number of Armenian churches - some as old as two thousand years - at approximately 3,500 destroyed. What kind of a person would drive a bulldozer through thousands of 1700 year-old buildings?) My only crtisiscm of the book is that it would have been nice if Mr. Balakian had spent more time on the destruction of the infrastruicture of ancient Armenia, though this might have been beyond the scope of what he was trying to achieve. The evidence in the American archives alone bearing wittness to the horrible purgings and the relentless archeological destruction of Anatolia is so overwhelming - not to mention the British, French and German archives - that it is amazing that anyone would have the gall to try and shroud the events in controversy. In addition to Professor Balakian's very touching memoir, for a scholarly account of the period between 1900 and 1923 that saw the end of the Ottoman Empire and the death of ancient Armenia and also brings together the information in the American, British, French and German archives in addition to newspaper accounts at the time, I highly recomend works by the British historian Christopher J. Walker, more specifically Walker's, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation is excellent and very well written, and all of UCLA's own Professor Richard Hovanissian's many ground breaking volumes on the same subject.

Balakian was a professor of mine, and this work stands firm as a clear representation of his pretentiousness.

Balakian is incredible. He speaks the truth. His audience loves him, both Armenians and non-Armenians alike are astonished by his style and charm. Truly an incredible man.

Elegant, spare, sensitive, bold.
A poet who takes care.
A stunning read.

It's a pity that the other online review is less than useful, sour grapes, and highly personal. Don't let it (or anything) steer you away from this fine writer and his stately words.

If you are really interested in what happened between Turks and Armenians in 1915,i can suggest you to read Heath Lowry's The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.Professor Heath Lowry is a well-known historian in Princeton University and in his book,he proves Ambassador Morgenthau's Story wrong scientifically,shows how the book is based on rumors.A must to read for those who are interested in this matter...

The book is advisable only when one reads it with Heath W. Lowry' s "The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau' s Story", published by ISIS Press, Istanbul in 1990. As Dr. Lowry describes:

"The answer is simple and relates to the fact that Morgenthau was writing a piece of wartime propaganda with the expressly stated purpose of mobilising support for President Wilson's war effort. He consciously down played the close relationships he enjoyed with the Young Turk leadership throughout his sojourn in Constantinople and sacrificed truth for the greater good of helping to generate anti-Turkish sentiment which would transform itself into pro-war sentiment."

Unfortunately the American public opinion during that time was based on such sources as the services of Dragaman (translators) between the officials of the Ottoman Empire and the American Ambassador. And these dragaman were not Ottoman Turks but Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Greeks both were in conflict with the Ottoman Empire. Ambassador Morgenthau used two of them, two Armenians, namely Hagop S. Andonian (personal secretary) and Arshag K. Schmavonian (legal assistant). The printed copy however went through severe war time propaganda editing by the US Secretary of State, Robert Lensing and Pulitzer award winning author, Burton J. Hendrick.

One of the most dramatic incidents and the diversion of the facts were about the life insurance benefits of the deceased Armenian insurers of an American Insurance company. The book claims that Talaat, the Ottoman Interior Minister, made a request to him that the Ambassador should help to facilitate payment the insurance benefits to the Ottoman Treasury, as there were no heirs to the insurers! However, Dr. Lowry proved that after reading the actual dated letters, the request of the Ottoman Minister was to stop the American Insurance Company from transferring their capital funds from Ottoman Empire to France, and thereby preserving sufficient capitalization for any benefits claims. Such diversion of the facts is extremely dangerous.

It is therefore an important document about the wartime journalism and subsequent unfortunate diversions of the facts to base Armenian claims of 1915. We could only be grateful to Dr. Lowry that he shed light into the story with his review of the original letters stored in FDR Library and in the National Achieves.

Ambassador Morgenthau has always been one of the most reliable sources on the Armenian Genocide. No surprise that so many attempts have been made to tarnish his image, or to question his testimonies on the terrible crime committed by the Ottoman Empire against its Christian Armenian subjects. Yet, the Morgenthau version of the 1915 events is abslutely irrefutable, and I strongly recommend this book to those interested in finding out what has really happened during the agony of the "ill man of Europe".