Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Knopf), by Grigoris Balakian

The eyewitnesses to genocide produced a large body of literature in the 20th century, and current events in Darfur promise more to come. Armenian Golgotha is the memoir of an Armenian Orthodox priest who managed to elude the death marches of the Turkish regime by disguising himself as a German (he spoke the language fluently) and with the aid of Sufis and other "righteous Turks." Introduced and co-translated by the respected Armenian-American poet Peter Balakian (a descendant of the author), the manuscript is written with great literary flourish even as it compiles a chronicle of mass murder by a government intent on eliminating ethnic minorities. In its effort to remember the names of the lost and to tally the dead, Armenian Golgotha is reminiscent of The Gulag Archipelago, a classic of 20th-century political catastrophe.