Smyrna, September 1922, Lou Ureneck
Smyrna, September 1922, Lou Ureneck
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
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Smyrna, September 1922
The American Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide

Author: Lou Ureneck

Narrator: David de Vries

Unabridged: 15 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/14/2020

Synopsis

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops. Turkish soldiers proceeded to burn the city and rape and kill countless Christian refugees. Unwilling to leave with the other American civilians and determined to get Armenians and Greeks out of the doomed city, Jennings worked tirelessly to feed and transport the thousands of people gathered at the city's Quay.

With the help of the brilliant naval officer and Kentucky gentleman Halsey Powell, and a handful of others, Jennings commandeered a fleet of unoccupied Greek ships and was able to evacuate a quarter million innocent people—an amazing humanitarian act that has been lost to history, until now. Before the horrible events in Turkey were complete, Jennings had helped rescue a million people.

About Lou Ureneck

Lou Ureneck, a former Nieman fellow and editor-in-residence at Harvard University, is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Ureneck is the author of Backcast, which won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit, and Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Rebecca on December 14, 2015

I want to go back to every history teacher I've ever had (and as a history major, that's a quite a few), show them this book, and say "Why didn't you tell me?!" I had heard about Ataturk, the father of modern, secular Turkey, the "great uniter"--but I had never heard of how he became that "father."......more

Goodreads review by Peter on August 15, 2021

A very thorough treatment about the aftermath of the Greek defeat in Anatolia in 1922 and the subsequent continuation of the Turkish genocide of Christians (mainly Armenians, later Greeks) that began in 1915. The burning of Smyrna (present day Izmir) and mass murder and deportations of Greeks in Sep......more

Goodreads review by Kealani on June 07, 2015

Lord have mercy The horrifying and painful truth, beautifully written. Truth that must be told and retold. Value of lives that must be reaffirmed.......more

Goodreads review by Leroy on October 04, 2016

This was a tough book to read, as the fact that it took almost a month to finish it shows. As I was reading through so many sections of the book I would get very depressed, angry and frustrated in a way that only a non-fiction book can do. This is the story of what happened in the city of Smyrna in......more

Goodreads review by Elgin on August 10, 2015

After WWI, parts of the Ottoman Empire were ceded to Greece. The Greek army moved in and occupied a large part of Anotolia. Turk Nationalists under Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk), pushed the Greek Army back to the Aegean Sea, and at the same time reinstagated the Turkish effort to rid their country of Chr......more

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