This is a book about genocide, but it is not ultimately a “genocide book.” Certainly, Power works her way through the stories of the major, undisputed genocides of the 20th Century (skipping over the Holocaust, other than through its legal ramifications through the Nuremburg trials) – Armenia, Cambodia, Iraq’s Anfal campaign, Bosnia (with special emphasis on Srebrenica), Rwanda and Kosovo. Along the way, she intersperses the tale of the creation of “genocide” as a concept, as something different and more sinister than “crimes against humanity,” and the ensuing enshrinement of that idea in international normative law.

But these tales have been told quite thoroughly in other (even if not always widely read) places. Still, one looking for a good overview of many of these tragedies (“I know something bad happened in Bosnia, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t really know what”) could do worse than to start here. She breaks down each event with a short summary of the political and human history, and then further examines the warnings given to Western leaders, their recognition that genocide was truly occuring (or lack thereof), their response (or lack thereof) and the aftermath and fallout from those policy decisions (or lack thereof).

Nearly 800 pages about the why, wherefore and how of the 20th Century's quickest, most personal and - possibly - least understood genocide. Obviously, it is not a fun read. But neither is it (surprisingly) particularly heart-wrenching, on a gut emotional level. Considering what is being discussed, this work almost astonishingly scientific. When one reads about the butchering of close to a million people within the span of 100 days, carried out in broad daylight in the very communities where the victims lived, oftentimes by those next to whom they'd lived for years, almost always with an arms cocktail that included rifles, grenades, machetes, nail-studded clubs, spears, bows and arrows, and even more basic implements like bicycle handlebars - when any thinking, rational human being contemplates this reality, it tends to boggle the mind. Even numerically: it is the literal equivalent (in the number of victims) of three (3) September 11ths every single day for over three months. In a country of 8 million people. Proportionally, given the population of the United States at the time, that would mean 23 million deaths in the US. Geographically, over a territory roughly the size of Vermont. How does one find enough imagination to conjure up such images and then even begin to make sense of them?