Black Earth The Holocaust as History and Warning

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

Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.