Gardens of Grief edition by Boston Teran Religion Spirituality eBooks
Download As PDF : Gardens of Grief edition by Boston Teran Religion Spirituality eBooks 
GARDENS OF GRIEF — a brilliant, and socially important novel — is less a sequel to THE CREED OF VIOLENCE than an organic evolvement. It follows John Lourdes, an agent with the Bureau of Investigation, who is sent by the U.S. State Department to Constantinople in 1915. The Great War has begun and the British have been defeated at the Dardanelles. In Turkey, the government means to see every Christian Armenian exterminated, in what will become the first genocide of World History. John Lourdes’ clandestine assignment is to help an outlaw priest named Malek get safely across the war-ravaged Ottoman Empire. The priest, hunted by the Turkish government because he is an Armenian, is a hero to his people and a political threat to the Central Powers. The novel, very much a Homeric epic, has the sweep and grandeur of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. It will be to modern literature what the great chanson degeste THE SONG OF ROLAND was to the Middle Ages. A parabolic and visceral tale of sacrifice and martyrdom. It is not only compelling human drama, but it is also rich with detail about what truly took place in Turkey in 1915. The book is the definitive battlefield for those who say the genocide did happen and those who say it did not. Regardless, the book presents the horror and the grandeur, in Kipling’s words, “Lest we forget.”
—FAB 40
Boston Teran is the author of six previous novels. He has been nominated and won numerous awards including the John Creasy Award, International IMPAC Award, Book of the Year in France, Book of the Year in Japan, and Readers Digest Best First Novel of the Year. Two of his novels are being developed into major motion pictures. God is a Bullet, Teran’s first novel, is currently being adapted for film by writer/producer Ehren Kruger (Reindeer Games, Blood and Chocolate, The Ring). His fifth novel, The Creed of Violence, published in the fall of 2009 and was bought by Universal Studios for the second highest price ever paid for an unpublished manuscript. Giv—The Story of a Dog and America is his sixth novel.
For more information or to arrange an interview with High Top Publishing, or possibly the reclusive Boston Teran, contact
Jocelyn Kelley, Kelley & Hall Book Publicity, 617-680-1976, Jocelyn@kelleyandhall.com
Gardens of Grief edition by Boston Teran Religion Spirituality eBooks
This book was quite a page turner while interwoven within the backdrop of the Armenian genocide. It tells a little bit of the horror of the genocide but not as detailed as most stories - yet poignant. Of course it made me sad to realize the main character never existed in real life...it would have been nice to think the US actually cared enough to get involved as the French actually did.I saw somewhere online that this is to be made into a movie at some point and I'm really looking forward to seeing it. I won't give spoilers but will say that if you like historical fiction and adventure this is quite a story. I was sorry to see it end.
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Gardens of Grief edition by Boston Teran Religion Spirituality eBooks Reviews
Many years ago, I had an elderly neighbor who told me stories about what she suffered through as a young girl in Turkey during WW1. I had forgotten many of the things she told me, but reading this book really brought her story back to life. GARDENS OF GRIEF is beyond literature, beyond entertainment. It is like something out of the oral tradition. Or something from the pages of a Herodotus. Besides the genocide, it deals with the major issues of life in very subtle ways. Racism, cultural hatreds, class struggle, the hidden agendas behind war, people rising up to embrace the greatness of their soul. Let me also say the book is utterly exciting and I understand why so much has been written and said about it and it's predecessor THE CREED OF VIOLENCE. The hero's journey down the Tigris River being hunted, the death camp of women and children, the fighting in Russia, and the escape from the prison in Erzurum are not only astonishing, but will bring you to tears. This is the kind of book that is going to generate huge controversy, and in my humble opinion, it is the kind of book worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1915, the American State Department sends Bureau of Investigation agent John Lourdes to Constantinople where the fighting has been fierce. Lourdes knows his assignment borders on suicide as the Ottoman Empire with their Central partners having defeated the British in the Dardanelles has begun an ethnic cleansing campaign to eradicate the Christian Armenians though the government insists they are at war with rebels rather than a planned genocide.
Lourdes mission is to bring out of the war zone, Father Malek who has become a symbol of the Armenian resistance as he gave up the plow to pick up the sword. At the same time the Ottoman Empire makes a concerted effort to catch the martyr and consequently the American whose Mexican roots enables him to somewhat blend in with the populace.
This is an incredible look at one of the first mass government sponsored genocides that rivals that of those that followed like the Nazis, the killing fields of Cambodia and the bloody red rivers of Rwanda, etc. With a nod to Solzhenitsyn's exposing of Stalin, the exhilarating story line is action-packed with some scenes of horrific inhumanity; but throughout the cautionary message is to never forget hoping the world shines a spotlight on the next ethnic cleaning to prevent another round of The Creed of Violence.
Harriet Klausner
The mystery author has struck again! Whether man, woman, writers' group, or ET, Boston Teran can spin a good yarn. This little novel is gripping from the first page. I would have read it one sitting, but Thanksgiving and seeing a new grandson took priority.
I struggled for a genre classification because I know booksellers, be they owners of brick-and-mortar coffee houses or on-line merchandisers, like to pigeon-hole what they sale. Here it is a suspense-thriller-adventure-historical fiction epic. In 245 pages, the author of Gardens of Grief does what it took Leon Uris 600 plus pages to do in Exodus. The latter dealt only peripherally with the Jewish holocaust. Boston Teran deals more directly with the Armenian one.
Turkish readers and the Turkish government can tune out now if they like, but butchers of the Ottoman Empire not only killed millions of Armenians, they probably encouraged Hitler and his Nazi murderers to do the same to the Jews. The Turks dodged the bullet of public opinion, a fact not overlooked by the Nazi establishment. It certainly prompted them to believe that the rest of the world wouldn't care what they did to the Jews. They were right--much of the official Western World didn't care until U.S. troops and others started reporting what they found in the Nazi concentration camps.
The Turks have an open wound of guilt with respect to their "Armenian solution." They have even leveraged their position in NATO to keep the U.S. government from using the words genocide, holocaust, and ethnic cleansing when describing their "Armenian solution." Use whatever words you want, but no amount of ostrich behavior or positive spin can change what really happened. It was obscene, organized murder, a mob lynching on the scale of millions.
World history was full of genocide, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings long before these words were even invented. The last potato famine in Ireland is perhaps an example closer to many of us in Canada and the U.S. The tools of genocide are not necessarily guns and mortars. Yugoslavia and Rwanda are more recent examples. Both present day Turks and the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq would like to rid themselves of those bothersome Kurds. Sri Lanka pussy-footed around with ethnic cleansing in their civil war. Historically what the Spanish and Portuguese did in South America and what we did in the U.S. to Native Americans was genocide.
I have a personal interest in the Armenian genocide. My hometown, Visalia, the capital of Tulare County in California, is about forty miles south of Fresno, one of the main centers of the Armenian population in the U.S. The whole San Joaquin Valley reminded the first immigrants in the 1880s of their Armenian homeland. They wrote back to relatives in the old country describing the potential for carrying on their peaceful love of the land. When the Ottomans began their ethnic cleansing, many Armenians fled to the New World. The Armenian diaspora carried with it the story of how more than 1.5 million of their countrymen--men, women, and children--perished under the Turks' brutal hands.
I grew up hearing these tales, albeit second hand--my father and mother's best friends were an Armenian couple. The time I spent playing in the vineyards with Jimmy and Johnny Iskenderian had the more serious complement of hearing grown-up conversations about the Armenian holocaust. I thought even then that it was obscene and unforgiveable what the Turks had done. At the same time, I admired the Armenian culture, especially the food. (Stuffed grape leaves is still one of my favorite entrees to this day and the Armenian pastry is to die for.) How could these good and happy people have suffered so much?
This is the background for Boston Teran's book. Like Exodus and other thrillers (Forsyth's work comes to mind), the historical facts seem to meld seamlessly into the story. You don't know where the history ends and the fiction begins. This book is easier to read and it is more profound. We see the holocaust up close and personal through the eyes of the main characters. It is not a pretty sight.
The hero is John Lourdes, the same one from the author's Creed of Violence. That makes this book a sequel. (The blurb on the back cover says it's less of a sequel than an organic evolvement--whatever that means. To me "sequel" has a more expansive definition, but words are like symbols in an equation--they can mean anything, especially in today's literature.) John is Mexican-American. Much is made in the book that he is swarthy so he can pass himself off as Armenian. I don't remember my Armenian friends as swarthy, but maybe I was just colorblind when I grew up. Also, as a Spanish speaker, I don't particularly think of John Lourdes as being a Mexican-American name (this might be explained in Creed, which I have not read), but maybe they'll change that in the movie (Universal has purchased film rights to both Creed and Gardens).
Lourdes is a spy. I don't believe that word was once used to describe him, but there is no doubt that he would be at home in the CIA. Moreover, this spy story, like Creed, is about oil. Where Creed was about America's intervention into the Mexican Revolution in 1910 for the sake of oil, Gardens is about the control of the Baku oil fields. My conclusion at the end is that the U.S. ignored the holocaust that was going on and left Lourdes and company to die due to the U.S. interest in that oil. Black gold has more of a Midas attraction than yellow, especially in the political world. (My own novel, Soldiers of God, has the future world oil crisis as a backdrop.)
The Great War, that war to end all wars, has just begun. Lourdes' assignment is to help free an Armenian priest from an Ottoman prison and get him safely across Turkey. The priest is a hero to his people, an avenging angel, and a political threat to the Axis powers. Their journey, in many ways the traditional buddy quest of many bad westerns, is fraught with enough skirmishes and galloping horses to keep the most ardent adventure reader sitting on the edge of his easy chair. Moreover, through the eyes of Lourdes, the priest, and their other amigos, we experience the butchery perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. Boston Teran doesn't soften the words here--his descriptions of the violence are definitely not for the squeamish.
One scene will always live with me. At the prison, the priest is tied to a pole in the courtyard. The Turks have nailed heavy metal plates to his feet, I suppose to keep him there even if he managed to free himself from the ropes. After he is rescued, Lourdes and company remove the metal plates. Phew! I don't know how the scene will be portrayed in the movie, but my imagination is good enough for me. I don't need the visuals.
Lourdes is not your typical spy. He's a loose cannon, in fact, and full of moral outrage. He's quite a character. I would have liked to see him developed a little more fully. In this, Boston Teran is a man after my own heart--he leaves much of the character description for the reader to fill out, using his own imagination to make a coherent picture from the glimpses given by the author. In general, this is good technique--it allows every reader to make the book a creation of his own imagination. Boston Teran carries this to an extreme. At the end, I had done as much as I could with the hints, but Lourdes was still very much a man of mystery.
As required by Hollywood, Lourdes does have a love interest, but Hollywood will have to add the passionate sex scenes. Alev, a relief worker in today's parlance, finds in Lourdes the yin to her yang. She says to Lourdes on one occasion that he carries the history of the world in his soul. In that, the priest, Alev, and Lourdes are well matched, for the history of the world you carry defines your moral outrage. At another point she remarks about an annotation in Lourdes' notebook, "What is. . . resource control?" Lourdes' answer is "The future." As we all know, the fight for oil continues to this day.
(This book review was prepared for Book Pleasures.)
I'm so glad I only paid 99c for this book. Unlike God is a Bullet, which was a good potboiler, I couldn't get past two chapters. The writing was awful and the punctuation childish. Perhaps more than one writer is a work here. Sack the one that threw this hasty effort together - it read like a first draft. I find it somewhat strange that so many good reviews were posted
I read this in one day because I couldn't put it down. It's sparked me to want to learn more about the Armenian genocide, and it reminds me of what is happening in the Middle East today with ISIS. It's an interesting novel about a very dark time that apoears to be repeating itself in many ways.
This book was quite a page turner while interwoven within the backdrop of the Armenian genocide. It tells a little bit of the horror of the genocide but not as detailed as most stories - yet poignant. Of course it made me sad to realize the main character never existed in real life...it would have been nice to think the US actually cared enough to get involved as the French actually did.
I saw somewhere online that this is to be made into a movie at some point and I'm really looking forward to seeing it. I won't give spoilers but will say that if you like historical fiction and adventure this is quite a story. I was sorry to see it end.
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