Peter Balakian was born in 1951 in New Jersey. His father was sports medicine inventor, Gerard Balakian, and his mother was Arax Aroosian Balakian. Balakian is a published and renowned poet, though I was unfamiliar with his work until I looked him up after reading this book. (I read several poems that I very much enjoyed and cannot wait to get the actual books of poetry he published to add to my collection.) He wrote another book, which is on my to be read list, called The Burning Tigris. (The Burning Tigris is about the Armenian Genocide.) In this book, Balakian offers portraits of several members of his family who were displaced and eradicated in the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. (This genocide is fervently denied by a lot of people, especially the Turkish government. It is also one of the most ignored genocides, next to the genocide of indigenous people from North America.)

I thought this book was deeply personal and well written. I loved learning about the people in the author's family. As a World War II history major, I have often been drawn to, and read a lot of, Holocaust survivor books. I think it is extremely important to tell the stories and experiences of people who are no longer around to tell them. It is so important to make sure that crimes against humanity are never forgotten, so that we do not repeat them in our modern societies. (That seems like...pissing into the wind, really, with the things going on today in the United States with the systematic stripping of women's rights, religious freedoms, the dumbing down and whitewashing of education, and rights for LGBTQIA folks. However, it is very important that we keep learning about these very things and preparing ourselves to fight against them.) There are a lot of details about the lesser taught genocide, which I thought was tremendous. I bought it specifically because I had only read about the Armenian Genocide in passing, and had a deep desire to want to learn more. Mission successful. Even though the book was educational, and also a personal reflection on someone's childhood and family members, the book was easy to read and a page turner. I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to.