Awards

• Long-listed for Samuel Johnson Prize 2015 (UK)
• Long-listed for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2015
• Long-listed for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2015.

Overview

A radical reframing of the Holocaust that challenges prevailing myths and draws disturbing parallels with the present LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE We have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million European Jews were already dead- shot at close range over pits and ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people. It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event. But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s. As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to think. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands was an acclaimed exploration of what happened in eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945, when Nazi and Soviet policy brought death to some 14 million people. Black Earth is a deep exploration of the ideas and politics that enabled the worst of these policies, the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Its pioneering treatment of this unprecedented crime makes the Holocaust intelligible, and thus all the more terrifying.

Full Product Details

9781784701482

Table of Contents

Reviews

Timothy Snyder's bold new approach to the Holocaust links Hitler's racial worldview to the destruction of states and the quest for land and food. This insight leads to thought-provoking and disturbing conclusions for today's world. Black Earth uses the recent past's terrible inhumanity to underline an urgent need to rethink our own future -- Ian Kershaw A wholly readable and utterly persuasive attempt to get us to look at the Holocaust in a different light. I read it twice, aghast but gripped by the moral abyss into which I was plunged on each page Observer Black Earth is provocative, challenging, and an important addition to our understanding of the Holocaust. As he did in Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder makes us rethink those things we were sure we already knew -- Deborah Lipstadt Part history, part political theory, Black Earth is a learned and challenging reinterpretation -- Henry A. Kissinger In this unusual and innovative book, Timothy Snyder takes a fresh look at the intellectual origins of the Holocaust, placing Hitler's genocide firmly in the politics and diplomacy of 1930s Europe. Black Earth is required reading for anyone who cares about this difficult period of history -- Anne Applebaum

Timothy Snyder's bold new approach to the Holocaust links Hitler's racial worldview to the destruction of states and the quest for land and food. This insight leads to thought-provoking and disturbing conclusions for today's world. Black Earth uses the recent past's terrible inhumanity to underline an urgent need to rethink our own future -- Ian Kershaw A wholly readable and utterly persuasive attempt to get us to look at the Holocaust in a different light. I read it twice, aghast but gripped by the moral abyss into which I was plunged on each page * Observer * Black Earth is provocative, challenging, and an important addition to our understanding of the Holocaust. As he did in Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder makes us rethink those things we were sure we already knew -- Deborah Lipstadt Part history, part political theory, Black Earth is a learned and challenging reinterpretation -- Henry A. Kissinger In this unusual and innovative book, Timothy Snyder takes a fresh look at the intellectual origins of the Holocaust, placing Hitler's genocide firmly in the politics and diplomacy of 1930s Europe. Black Earth is required reading for anyone who cares about this difficult period of history -- Anne Applebaum

Author Information

Timothy Snyder has been called 'the leading interpreter of our dark times'. As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge towards counsel and prediction, working against authoritarians and populists. After a quarter century at Yale, he now teaches history at the Munk School in the University of Toronto and his books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries.

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