This is an important, beautifully crafted book. It contributes significantly to our understanding of what happened during these 30 years of violence, as well as to our understanding of genocide more broadly. Morris and Ze'evi do an impressive job of resolving the tension between their historians' eye for detail, nuance, context and specificity and their attempt to offer a more general explanatory argument. That combination of the specific and the general prompts readers to ask questions and will no doubt provoke debate—as all good books do.

Israeli historian Benny Morris doesn’t do things by half. The footnotes of his new book on the 30-year genocide of Christians by their Turkish rulers, cowritten with his colleague Dror Zeevi, take up more than a fifth of the 640-page work.