Skip to main content

Black Dog of Fate - Peter Balakian

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

  1. A book about Armenians and Armenian genocide told from the perspective of a third generation Armenian immigrant in the USA
  2. Book is as much the story of the author himself as it is of Armenia
  3. It is not your primary reference book for the history of Armenian genocide, but it is very good to understand what were the real life impacts and struggles of the genocide and explusion of Armenian Christians from their homeland

🎨 Impressions

It was haunting and depressing. Initially I was waiting for the part where this switches from an autobiography to the genocide and its aftermath. But when it started it didn’t take much time to become an unbearable roller coaster of death, destruction, torture and rape. It was too much. But I went through it anyway. Because it deserves to be heard. This story has stood in the dark for too long. Sufferings of the Armenians must come in sight of the world. I am sure that the barbaric forms of cruelty described in the book does not even scratch the surface of what really happened. It pains me whenever I hear the Armenia now.

How I Discovered It

I discovered it while searching in audible for books related to Armenian genocide after hearing about it on Hardcore history Podcast by Dan Carlin

Who Should Read It?

  • Everyone who wants to know important events that took place throughout the last century.
  • Everyone who has an unreasonable amount of hate towards Hitler, and don’t know about Armenian genocide
  • Everyone who has the stomach to read through such heinous torture and war crimes

But I am not insistent on everyone reading this same book. As I said I don’t think this is a proper history of the Armenian genocide. Its a mixture of history and biography. So please read about Armenian Genocide, whether it is this book or another book or from the internet (a reliable page I hope) I really don’t care

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

  • I would say I became a whole lot more antagonistic towards the Turks and their history, because they even now do not accept that they committed this atrocity towards the Armenians, which the worst way to rub salt onto someone’s wounds. If they had admitted the genocide and said it was the right thing to do, even then, they would retained some amount of code in my eyes. Because even when they’re evil, at least they’re being honest about it. But this is a whole new level of low.
  • I feel respect towards the nation of Germany which acknowledged its crimes and tried very best to undo the wrongs of the past.

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • “What did it mean for a whole civilization to be expunged from the earth? What did it mean when a people who loved and worked and built a culture on the land where they had lived for three thousand years were destroyed? What did it mean for the human race?”
  • “When a civilization is erased, there is a new darkness on the earth. I could feel dust blowing over dry land, where now blood is part of the rocks, where the water will never run clean again.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

⛰ What It's About As the title suggests it’s about Ivan Ilych and his manner of death. Story begins with others hearing about the man’s death and reacting to it, then it moves on to the perspective of the title character, where we find out what kind of a man he was, how he lived his life, his regrets, troubles and bedridden thoughts. 🔍 How I Discovered It While browsing through Audible I saw a Tolstoy title that was surprisingly quite small in length, usually he writes everything as an epic. So this caught my eye and the title made it seem like a detective novel: “The Death of Ivan Ilych” 🧠 Thoughts It is mostly the musings of a man who just wants to go about his daily routine disturbed by the sudden death of his friend and musings of the friend about his approaching death. Overall it’s a contemplation on death and what it means to be alive. It gives an understanding of why many bedridden and sick people are so miserable even when everyone around them is trying so hard so ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 "A philosophical debate which is also a psychological crime thriller" is what Dr. Jordan Peterson said (not his exact words, but the gist ) pitching 'Crime and punishment' to his audience during a lecture. This is exactly what I felt while I was reading the novel.  Crime and Punishment is set in the 19th century St Petersburg, where the poor lives like vermin, rich live like kings and those in the middle barely gets by. I read this book expecting a story with good philosophical insights and discussions and I was not disappointed at all. It's a gripping tale of cold blooded murder, where the intentions of the murderer is very different from what we have usually seen from fiction so far. It is also a summary of almost all the philosophical and cultural discussions of that period.  For me the main purpose of reading a book, when I was younger than I am now, has always been the eagerness to listen to heartwarming or intriguing stories, filled with characters who I c...
Post a Comment
Read more