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.