[This memoir] by the American poet Peter Balakian [is] a compelling memoir about growing up American in a family that was haunted by a past … fraught with terror. [The book] is set in … affluent New Jersey … At the center of what was a quintessential American baby boom childhood lay the dark specter of a trauma his forebears had experienced – the Ottoman Turkish government’s extermination of more than a million Armenians in 1915. -Dust jacket.