MacKeen centers her book on her grandfather, focusing on the years 1914-18, covering his youth as a peddler and later a courier his conscription into a labor battalion his exile from his family home and his struggle to stay alive in Mesopotamian internment camps.Īpproximately 100 years later, MacKeen retraced her grandfather's steps. Saying that historians have rightfully disputed Turkey's take on this, MacKeen tries to set the record straight by presenting the details of what some call the first Holocaust. Interestingly, as MacKeen notes, the Turkish government still denies that such a genocide took place, arguing that the Armenians were enemies of the state. The other tells of her mother's extended family as they lived in the volatile years that led up to the Armenian genocide. One tells of her own efforts to follow in Miskjian's footsteps, believing that she needed to embed herself into his experiences in order to bring them alive on the page. His granddaughter, Dawn Anahid MacKeen, tells how he beat the odds in her dramatic memoir, The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey, just out in paperback.īeginning her book with events occurring in 1910, MacKeen offers two narratives that interweave past and present. One and one half-million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in the years leading up to and during World War I. Stepan Miskjian survived. Published by Mariner Books, 368 pages, $15.95 Her readers will be rapt-and a lot smarter by the end.”-Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion¶ “Harrowing.THE HUNDRED YEAR WALK: AN ARMENIAN ODYSSEY A New York Post Must-Read ¶ “This book reminds us that the way we treat strangers can ripple out in ways we will never know…MacKeen’s excavation of the past reveals both uncomfortable and uplifting lessons about our present.”-Ari Shapiro, NPR ¶ “I am in awe of what Dawn MacKeen has done…Her sentences sing.
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Her readers will be rapt-and a lot smarter by the end.”-Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion¶ “Harrowing.”- Us Weekly
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¶ A Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
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Their shared story is a testament to family, to home, and to the power of the human spirit to transcend the barriers of religion, ethnicity, and even time itself. Dawn uses his journals to guide her to the places he was imperiled and imprisoned and the desert he crossed with only half a bottle of water.
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In The Hundred-Year Walk MacKeen alternates between Stepan’s courageous account, drawn from his long-lost journals, and her own story as she attempts to retrace his steps, setting out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension. The award-winning story of a young Armenian man’s harrowing escape from the massacre of his people and of his granddaughter’s quest to retrace his steps ¶ “Part family heirloom, part history lesson, The Hundred-Year Walk is an emotionally poignant work, powerfully imagined and expertly crafted.”-Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan’s Inheritance ¶ Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard from her mother how her grandfather Stepan miraculously escaped from the Turks during the Armenian genocide of 1915, when more than one million people-half the Armenian population-were killed.