Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Of the half dozen violent conflicts that erupted during the disintegration of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most complicated and intractable has been the Azerbaijani-Armenian dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Never have all the twists and turns, sad carnage, and bullheadedness on all sides been better described -- or, indeed, better explained, for de Waal, by deftly combining history with carefully assembled on-the-ground detail, offers a deeper and more compelling account of the conflict than anyone before. He ferrets out critical material from an amazingly diverse set of interviews and assembles the story in a calm, firm, utterly fair-minded fashion, one likely to exercise give-no-quarters partisans on both sides.