BLACK EARTH - Timothy Snyder
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.
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 we face in the twenty-first.
The evocative jacket photograph shows Cêsis in Latvia in 2004 and is by Magnum photographer Alex Majoli.
Published by Bodley Head, Black Earth is on the 2015 longlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction
