Advanced praise for Six Then Five

“Niko Michalopoulos’ memoir, Six then Five, is his story and his family’s story. But it is our story, too. Taking us on a journey to his family’s Armenian roots, their experience with the genocide and ultimate journey to suburban America, we are treated to an intensely personal and particular story, of course. But it’s more than that. It is, in many ways, a quintessentially American story, a story of forgetting—as the process of becoming American has been for so many—and remembrance. Indeed, Michalopoulos calls on us to remember, and in a world in which we have too often forgotten the lessons of past pogroms and genocides and allowed them to reoccur, we cannot afford to keep forgetting. Stories of war and displacement are always personal, always best understood not with body counts and geopolitical analysis but through the stories of the families who endured them. But this is a book about our present as much as our past, about raising children through the ruptures of post 9/11 America and a divorce while instilling in them a sense of connection in a world that conspires to make us forget where we’ve come from. Six then Five is a reminder that we’ve been here before, and that to remember the past is to move more authentically into the future.”

Theodore Richards, Author of Reimagining the Classroom and A Letter to My Daughters