Black Earth, Timothy Snyder
Black Earth, Timothy Snyder
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Black Earth
The Holocaust as History and Warning

Author: Timothy Snyder

Narrator: Mark Bramhall

Unabridged: 16 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/08/2015

Synopsis

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

About The Author

Timothy Snyder holds the Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School, University of Toronto, and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, The 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul

UPDATE : PUTIN AND THE INVASION OF UKRAINE In October 2015 I reviewed this book very favourably except for the last chapter, in which the author makes some astonishingly harsh comments on the leaders of China and Russia. You just don't expect this viciousness in a scholarly book. There is a tirade ab......more

Quotes

“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

Awards

  • Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award
  • Gustav Ranis International Book Prize
  • Mark Lynton History Prize
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