Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder Narrated by Mark Bramhall

Overview

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 the #1 New York Times bestselling author of On Tyranny

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR-The Washington Post, The Economist, Publishers Weekly

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on untapped sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think and thus all the more terrifying.*
*
By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was-and ourselves as we are.*
*
Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.

New York Times Editors' Choice ¿*Finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize; the Mark Lynton History Prize; the Arthur Ross Book Award

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Audio

11/30/2015
Veteran voice actor Bramhall gives a sturdy and compelling reading of Snyder’s riveting examination of the rise and implementation of the Holocaust. The book offers a detailed analysis of how the collapse—rather than the excess—of Central and Eastern European nation-state power (a collapse instigated by both the Nazis and Soviets) led to the Holocaust. Bramhall does a fine job as narrator. The complexity of the author’s argument poses a challenge, but Bramhall’s focused yet conversational delivery holds the listener’s attention throughout. Most effective is his unflinching portrayal of the stories of those who suffered horrendously and died, not just at the hands of the Nazis, but from their neighbors and supposed friends. A Crown/Duggan hardcover. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/29/2015
This brilliant book—effectively a companion volume to Snyder’s critically acclaimed 2010 work, Bloodlands—focuses on the Jewish victims of the grotesque policies of the Nazis and their shifting allies in the lands contested by Germans, Soviets, Poles, and others in the years of the Holocaust. Snyder brings two fresh elements to his dizzying, harrowing tale. The first is his extraordinarily wide and deep research into the remarkable stories, many unknown, of individual Holocaust survivors, the subject of the last half of his book. The second element, likely to be controversial, is his argument, asserted and reasserted, that, at its roots, the Holocaust was made possible by the failure of national states—by the Soviets and the Nazis stripping public, legal protections from millions of people, who were thus left exposed to removal and death. Hence the “warning” of the book’s subtitle: the weakening of strong national states threatens human survival wherever it occurs, as it did in the case of the Anschluss, in which Germany absorbed Austria, and as it did in the case of the destruction of the Polish state. It’s a plausible, strong argument aimed sharply at Americans who believe that “freedom is the absence of state authority.” Maps. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Clear-eyed . . . Arresting . . . An unorthodox and provocative account . . . Snyder is admirably relentless.”—The New Yorker

“Black Earth is mesmerizing . . . Remarkable . . . Gripping . . . Disturbingly vivid . . . Mr. Snyder is sometimes mordant, often shocked, always probing.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Revelatory . . . Evocative . . . Most relevant today.”—The Atlantic

“An unflinching look at the Holocaust . . . Mr. Snyder is a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present.” —The New York Times

“Snyder’s historical account has a vital contemporary lesson. . . . It’s a testament to his intellectual and moral resources that he can so deeply contemplate this horrific past in ways that strengthen his commitment to building a future based on law, rights, and citizenship.”—The Washington Post

“Black Earth elucidates human catastrophe in regions with which a Western audience needs to become familiar.”—The New York Times Book Review

“An impressive reassessment of the Holocaust, which steers an assured course [and] challenges readers to reassess what they think they know and believe . . . Black Earth will prove uncomfortable reading for many who hew to cherished but mythical elements of Holocaust history.”—The Economist

“Excellent in every respect . . . Although I read widely about the Holocaust, I learned something new in every chapter. The multilingual Snyder has mined contemporaneous Eastern European sources that are often overlooked.”—Stephen Carter, Bloomberg

“In Black Earth, a book of the greatest importance, Snyder now forces us to look afresh at these monumental crimes. Written with searing intellectual honesty, his new study goes much deeper than Bloodlands in its analysis, showing how the two regimes fed off each other.”—Antony Beevor, The Sunday Times

Library Journal

07/01/2015
Snyder (history, Yale Univ., Bloodlands) asks what lessons have been learned from the Holocaust 70 years after the end of World War II. The unfolding of the Third Reich is chronicled using survivor testimonies and archival sources that cover the effect of widespread famine and political upheaval in post-World War I Europe on Hitler's racial policies, up until his rise to dominance in the 1930s and 1940s. As in Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt's Holocaust, variations in implementation of the Final Solution by country are examined. Snyder highlights the doubly occupied areas of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, where the majority of deaths occurred. The application of his analysis of the Holocaust's causes to 21st-century political conditions and ecological stresses is grim. Competition for increasingly scarce planetary resources dovetail with the demonization of neighbors to create conditions remarkably similar to those prior to World War II. VERDICT Snyder's investigation will appeal to readers with an interest in the history of the Holocaust; his call to action will attract those who believe that, as philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."—Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

Kirkus Reviews

2015-06-16
A prominent historian brings the Holocaust under new scrutiny and wonders if the right confluence of modern forces could bring genocide back. Snyder (History/Yale Univ.) polarized academics and other experts on the Holocaust with his study Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), and he largely continues that line of thinking here as he attempts to contextualize the events that led up to the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. The author argues that Hitler saw the world in terms of a twisted kind of ecology, one in which he saw Jews as a mistake to be removed. He also glances off the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, the mistaken concept that Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, but he admits that there's no excuse for claims of ignorance of these graphic events. "What happened in the second half of 1941 was an accelerating campaign of murder that took a million Jewish lives and apparently convinced the German leadership that all Jews under their control could be eliminated," Snyder writes. "This calamity cannot be explained by stereotypes of passive or community Jews, of orderly or preprogrammed Germans, of beastly or antisemitic locals, or indeed by any other cliché, no matter how powerful at the time, or how convenient today. It would have been impossible without a special kind of politics." In addition to probing the intellectual origins of the Final Solution, the author also offers thoughtful portrayals of Jews who survived execution and how institutions and states, as well as specific individuals, were crucial in these rescues. Snyder argues that the Holocaust should stand as a warning for our own future, but his conclusion is rather tepid in its analysis, with simplistic pronouncements that "our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same." A scholarly examination that poses important questions but ultimately offers less in the way of original reportage than Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL (2015).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169495331
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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Excerpted from "Black Earth"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Timothy Snyder.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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