Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide

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 Armenian genocide of 1915, which his grandfather escaped (but other family members did not). From there, Bogosian drops the memoir and launches into an engrossing, heavily-researched account of Operation Nemesis, the code name for an international campaign, carried 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 centuries 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)