[9] Philosopher Patrick Madigan wrote that the authors "have performed a Herculean labour in compensating for the heavily-purged Turkish records and sanitized official archives through exhaustive research in diplomatic, missionary and tourist reports to produce this doorstop of a book that will serve as the definitive account of a genocide" and concludes that "As one immerses oneself in the details, it is hard to resist a Nietzschean-and-Girardian argument on the power of ressentiment when one sees one’s once-dominant culture defeated and humiliated by a people you once had conquered – and to visit one’s consequent frustration, outrage and fury upon an innocent-but-different scapegoat who could be depicted as somehow responsible and even a fifth-columnist.".

He praises the "sheer amount of incriminating testimony that Morris and Ze’evi have managed to assemble", including demonstrating the personal responsibility of Mustafa Kemal for completing the genocide and ethnic/religious cleansing of the empire's remaining Christian population.

However, he faults the authors' interpretation in some places, stating "the Assyrians... were less of a passive victim than Morris and Ze'evi maintain" and that the international law concept of genocide may not be the best way to understand endemic ethnic and religious violence in Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia.

[13] Mark Levene writes that the book lacks attention to nuances and different factions in the Ottoman Empire, and that "everything is reduced to an essentialist clash of civilizations, a thesis they can only sustain by suffocating complexity or simply not engaging with it all".

He concludes that "the exterminatory violence of this period can be best explained not through a traditionally religious prism per se but actually its breakdown as the sinews of the old, hierarchic, Islamic-Ottoman order collapsed psychically and actually under the intolerable weight of both geo-political and nationalizing pressures".

[8] She argues that Morris and Ze'evi, who rely heavily on British and American sources, have a limited understanding of how the Ottoman millet system actually operated in practice, and underestimate the role of the expulsions and mass killings of Muslims during the Balkan Wars as a trigger for the genocide.

[2] Mustafa Aksakal states that the book is less persuasive than other publications on mass violence in the late Ottoman Empire and "The handling of some of the source material raises doubts about the extent and care taken in research.