Bloodlands - by Timothy Snyder (Paperback)

About the Book

Hardcover first published in 2010; paperback first published in 2012.

Book Synopsis

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century.

Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.
 
Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Review Quotes

"A brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century."--Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books

"A magisterial work.... Snyder's account in engaging, encyclopedic."--Foreign Affairs

"A startling new interpretation of the period ... a stunning book."--David Denby, New Yorker

"A superb and harrowing history."--Financial Times

"A superb work of scholarship, full of revealing detail, cleverly compiled...and in places beautifully written.... Snyder does justice to the horror of his subject through the power of storytelling."--The Sunday Times (London)

"Genuinely shattering.... I have never seen a book like it."--Istvan Deak, New Republic

"Gripping and comprehensive.... Mr. Snyder's book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe's modern history."--Economist

"Snyder...compels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin's regime and then by Hitler's Reich.... A comprehensive and eloquent account."--New York Times Book Revew

"A gigantic achievement in modern history."--Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show

About the Author

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The author of thirteen books, including the bestsellers On Tyranny and Black Earth, his work has been translated into forty languages. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.