Publishers Weekly - March 16, 2015

nomena such as rains of frogs and a bit of ill-placed Indian travelogue at the end.

Nevertheless, Barnett beautifully evokes universal themes of connecting cycles of water, air, wind, and earth to humankind across time and culture, leaving readers contemplating their deeper ties with the natural world. (May)

A Solemn Pleasure:
To Imagine, Witness, and Write

Melissa Pritchard. Bellevue Literary (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-934137-96-3

Novelist Pritchard (Palmerino) offers an uneven but often moving collection of 15 essays on such varied topics as the search for a stable sense of place and the writing life. “We praise artists to devalue ourselves,” Pritchard writes in “A Graven Space,” which proves less concerned with its ostensible subject—Georgia O’Keeffe— than with the creation of false narratives around idols. “From the Deep South to the Desert South: An Epiphyte’s Confession” discusses Pritchard’s attempts to emulate famous Russian and American Southern writers early in her career, only to find she had become “a clever mimic.” Pritchard’s interest in location is clear throughout, whether she’s in London, Panjshir, or Edinburgh; the collection peaks with her revelation that she had found, in the American Southwest, a place without attachments. Her writing is often at its best at its most somber, as when describing the hospice nurses who attended Pritchard’s dying mother as “midwives,” or recalling the life and death of an American soldier she met while embedded as a journalist in Afghanistan. One of the strongest selections, “Still, God Helps You” depicts her encounter with a Sudanese man who was sold into slavery as a child. The collection’s impact is blunted by repetitive essays on the craft of writing. Nonetheless, readers will treasure the book’s numerous memorable moments. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (May)

In Montmartre:
Picasso, Matisse, and
the Birth of Modernist Art

Sue Roe. Penguin Press, $29.95 (365p) ISBN

978-1-59420-495-1

Montmartre, the hillside district of northern Paris, lay at the heart of an

Operation Nemesis:
The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide

Eric Bogosian. Little, Brown, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-316-29208-5

Fans of Bogosian’s one-man shows (Pounding Nails in the Floor with My
Forehead) will recognize his provocative sensibility in this book’s very first
paragraph, in which he recalls being told by his grandfather, “If you ever meet
a Turk, kill him.” Bogosian doesn’t linger on this advice,
given to him when he was four; he presents it as an alarming
but not unusual consequence of the 1915 Armenian genocide,
in which many members of his family were murdered. From
there, Bogosian drops the memoir and launches into an
engrossing, heavily-researched account of Operation
Nemesis, the code name for an international campaign, car-
ried out by Armenian survivors, to assassinate the various
Turkish heads of state who orchestrated the genocide. The
details read like a Hollywood epic, but Bogosian plays it straight, letting the
facts tell the story without sensationalizing or romanticizing. Though the author
is well known as a playwright, actor, and novelist (Perforated Heart), this is his
first work of nonfiction, and the book’s scope is ambitious: it also covers centu-
ries of Armenian history and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. For those
familiar with this terrain, Bogosian has uncovered a little-known aspect of it in
fascinating detail. For everyone else, this is a highly readable introduction. (May)

The Great Fire:
One American’s Mission to Rescue
Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide

Lou Ureneck. Ecco, $26.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-06-2259882

Ureneck (Backcast), a professor of journalism at Boston University, uses war-
time archives and private papers from the principals involved to revisit the
inferno of Smyrna, the concluding tragedy of the decade-long campaign of reli-
gious and ethnic cleansing that “killed more than three mil-
lion people” across Asia Minor and marked the end of the
Ottoman Empire. Talks with WWI allies—including
England, France, Italy, and Greece—broke down when
former Ottoman army officer Mustapha Kemal rejected old
treaties, sparking conflict between Greek occupation troops
and Turkish nationalists that led to deportations and execu-
tions of local Christians, primarily Armenians, Greeks, and
Assyrians. Ureneck highlights the resourcefulness of U.S.

Navy Captain Arthur J. Hepburn and his sailors, who formed a buffer to get a number of terrified Americans through the fire—and enraged mob—to safety on a destroyer offshore. Recounting the personal and political activities of key figures, Ureneck wisely underscores several essential themes of the West’s relationships with Muslim countries that remain concerns today: a fragile American foreign policy, human rights violations, and ambitions to control regional oil supplies. Surprisingly fresh, haunting, and potent, Ureneck offers a new perspective on the unforgiveable tragedy at Smyrna and the modern religio-ethnic conflicts that continue to trouble the region. (May)