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The harrowing story of a Methodist Minister and a principled American naval officer who helped rescue more than 250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians - a tale of bravery, morality, and politics, published to coincide with the genocide's centennial.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.



About the Author

Lou Ureneck

Lou Ureneck teaches journalism at Boston University. A former Nieman fellow and editor in residence at Harvard University, Ureneck was a newspaper editor, in Maine and Philadelphia. He was born in New Brunswick, N.J. His most recent book, "The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide," tells the riveting story of a rescue operation led by a small-town minister from upstate New York. He saved more than a quarter-million people from the Ottoman city of Smyrna, the empire's richest city, and scene of the last terrifying episode of the genocide that killed millions of Armenians and Greeks at the beginning the last century. The story is both tragic and inspirational. Ureneck's first book, "Backcast," won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit. His second book, Cabin, was about a cabin he built in the hills of western Maine. The book won him praise as a contemporary Thoreau.



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