Owing to the "Macedonian Question", a state of low-level civil war in Ottoman Macedonia and the empire's chronic failing finances, Abdul Hamid II lost popularity, leading to a popular revolution in August 1908, set off by an erroneous rumor that a summit between King Edward VII and the Emperor Nicholas II had led a secret Anglo-Russian agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire.

Abdul Hamid II was overthrown in April 1909 by a revolutionary group called the Committee of Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks, after he attempted a coup aimed at taking back the power he had lost in 1908.

The genocide received an immense account of media coverage in the United States, leading to the Near East Relief Committee being set up to save the Armenians in September 1915.

Woodrow Wilson and some members of Congress supported this idea, but it never worked fully because the United States had oil interests in the Ottoman Empire and wanted to remain on good terms.

Cooper wrote that Balakian provided an "unremitting depiction of irrational barbarism by sociopathic Turkish leaders and a fanatical population against a generally unresisting minority" but "only a superficial sense of the changes in the centuries-old relationship between Turks and Armenians that could unleash such violence".

[1] In a review in The Boston Globe, John Shattuck wrote: "The Burning Tigris has major weaknesses, including its cursory explanation of what drove the Turkish government to exterminate the Armenians and its limited account of how Turkey managed for so long to block all efforts to tell the truth.

As one of these voices, early feminist writer and champion of the Armenian cause Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in 1903, "National crimes demand international law, to restrain, prohibit, punish, best of all, to prevent.

""[2] In a review in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Stephen Feinstein wrote: "Balakian makes it clear that the discourse about Armenia has not ended: Unlike the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust, no Turkish high official was brought to trial.

Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally, has intervened in congressional attempts to label the genocide according to U.N. convention, and to this day prohibits discourse about its own history and prosecutes teachers who tell the story in their classrooms.

Although Balakian's research is not based on original documents in Turkish or the languages of the region, he has succeeded in writing a lucid and engaging account that serves as a useful entry point for readers unfamiliar with a complex subject.

The sheer scale of the massacres has an overwhelming impact and his access to the accounts of survivors and diplomats, and his understanding of Armenian culture and society, help bring to life the world that was lost with the victims.

"[4] However, Mazower harshly criticised Balkian for what he felt was his morality play view of the genocide with the Armenians as the pure, righteous victims being pursued by "malevolent perpetrators led by psychopaths such as Sultan Abdul Hamid".

[4] Mazower wrote: "None of this in any way justifies what happened to the Armenians, but it underlines the existential crisis that faced the empire's young and arrogant leadership, humiliated on the battlefield, their grand strategy in ruins...The Burning Tigris remains, understandably enough, a work of denunciation.

[7] Sigman wrote that for Disraeli the most important thing to support the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russia, which led his government to place realpolitik ahead of morality, which he argued was all typical of Western responses to atrocities in the 20th century.