I vividly recall the first suicide bombing I reported on for the Observer. It was in Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road, one of the main shopping streets, in 2002. A 28-year-old Palestinian woman, Wafa Idris, had killed an 81-year-old Israeli man, Pinhas Tokatli, as well as herself and injuring scores more.

The last one I covered was in Iraq in 2007, in the town of Tal Afar, where a 19-year-old Sunni bomber had barged his way into the wedding feast of a Shia police officer who lived around the corner from him, killing four people including two children. I’ve covered other appalling scenes of violence, but I’ve always been struck by a special horror when confronted by the aftermath of a suicide attack; by the shocking intimacy involved.

In The Price of Paradise, Iain Overton tries to make sense of a phenomenon that has claimed more than 72,000 lives since the event he identifies as the first recorded suicide bombing: the assassination of the tsar of Russia in 1881.

While it is easy to crunch the numbers, what is more difficult to comprehend is the motivation of the individuals involved. Why, the author asks as he travels the globe, do people volunteer for suicide attacks?

It is a good question and one that others – from academics and journalists to Islamic scholars – have sought to answer before. But the hunt for meaning is an exasperating search.

Suicide bombing is held up as heroic by those who send out the bombers and often by the attackers themselves in videos prepared beforehand. Laden with political or religious ideology, it is defined by those employing it as an act of resistance: against occupation or intervention, or mores viewed as inimical (the influence of western culture, say). But it doesn’t help to explain why someone would become a suicide bomber.

An alternative approach is to look into the psychology of individual killers, how their lives and beliefs led them to that point. I recall how in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, during the peak period of suicide bombings in the early 21st century, you would know within a few hours not just the victims’ identities but that of the killer.

Friends and relatives were interviewed and lives raked over in the search for meaning. Often, though, they would present an idealised view of the bomber – either in terms of how they had acted to redress national grievances or in the rationalising of the killer’s personal setbacks as an explanation. And still you would be no closer to understanding.

What Overton proposes is a sort of grand unified theory of suicide bombing, tracing a thread of bloody utopian thinking through a century or so of self-destructive murder, where the act prefigured either an idea of self-sacrifice for a greater good or reflected the religious conviction that the self continues.

“Such influences,” he writes in his prologue, “inspired the title of this book… It refers to the acceptance of death as the price of a bombing; how a suicide attack is perceived as the best way – even the only way – to defeat the enemy and usher in a new, peaceful age on earth; how a suicide attack is seen to offer the martyr access to paradise in their next life as reward for their actions”.

Provocative and timely, The Price of Paradise is a highly readable overview of the subject, full of personal reporting in which Overton not only asks the right questions but attempts to place the recent phenomenon in a wider context of suicide attacks, taking in Russian revolutionary bomb throwers, kamikaze aircrew and kaiten (the Japanese pilots of manned torpedoes), as well as the Tamil Tigers’ suicide unit, the Black Tigers.

But if Overton provides a useful overview of the strands of Islamic theology used to justify both violent certain death and the murder of civilians, he is on less sure ground elsewhere. At one stage, he mentions the support of the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi for suicide bombings targeting Israelis. Which is true, as far as it goes, but Qaradawi rejects the term “suicide operations”.

The reality, as Overton makes clear elsewhere, is that mainstream Islamic teaching has strongly proscribed both suicide and the killing of civilians. That has required its proponents to make often involved arguments – like Qaradawi’s – to make them more palatable.

The Price of Paradise is most interesting in its tracking of the development of suicide attacks over the past 40 years – from an appalling tool in conflict in the Middle East to something that under Islamic State became an end in itself; a construct that says, in Overton’s words, “the suicide bomber’s sacrifice has become a necessary precursor of victory”.

But the most urgent question is one for the future. Might this iteration of suicide attacks be coming to an end with the decline in the conditions that sustained it – the self-proclaimed Isis caliphate?

• The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age by Iain Overton is published by Quercus (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99