Black Earth

By Timothy Snyder,

Book cover of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Book description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[Timothy] Snyder identifies the conditions that allowed the Holocaust—conditions our society today shares. . . . He certainly couldn’t be more right about our world.”—The New Republic

A “gripping [and] disturbingly vivid” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of the defining tragedy of our time, from…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Black Earth as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I was, like many people, trying to make sense of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I heard Timothy Snyder in numerous interviews, so I was keen to read one of his books. This one is a history of the Holocaust. It provides the background to the racist geopolitical ideology that informed Hitler.

But what I found most absorbing was Snyder’s argument that it was in the zones, especially those that had experienced both Soviet then Nazi invasions, where the state had ceased to exist that the killing was most rampant. Non-citizens fared worse than citizens. The surprising conclusion is that…

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