The Best Books of 2020, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part I)

To mark the close of 2020, we asked several of our writers to name the best three books they’ve read this year, and briefly to explain their choices. We have encouraged them to pick two recent books, and one older one. The first five of their answers appear below in alphabetical order. The rest will appear tomorrow and Friday. (Unless otherwise noted, all books were published in 2020. Classic books are listed by their original publication dates.)

Hussein Aboubakr

Before the Holocaust, there was the Armenian genocide. But its victims weren’t only Armenians. There were also the Greeks and the Assyrians, who went from making up 20 percent of the Anatolian population to only 2 percent in the course of 30 years. Based on exhaustive historical scholarship, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Harvard, 672pp., $35) by the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi tries to provide a comprehensive historical account of the murderous events that transpired in the late Ottoman empire, through the rule of three different regimes. Morris and Ze’evi argue that the three waves of anti-Christian violence—the Hamidian massacre of 1894-1896, the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916, and the destruction of the remaining Christian communities in 1919-1924—constitute one single event of ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities by Ottoman and then Turkish officials.