Finished Black Earth a couple days ago and I gotta say - I'm unimpressed. The argument for the resurgence of Nazi-ism is basically "destroy a country twice and plug into a race's latent hostility towards outsiders and genocides will happen." The author does a marvelous job in his "pile all your pontification in one place" afterword of pointing to Hutu vs. Tutsi violence but glosses over Bosnia like it never happened, probably because it was stopped in its tracks by NATO. The author also stone-cold ignores Chechnya, probably because it demonstrates the exact opposite of his hypothesis.

Dunno. Judt, Tuchman and Said make a pretty compelling case that the Holocaust happened because Europe has hated the fuck out of some jews for a long goddamn time and the only thing different was the scale. Snyder just sorta waves hands and argues that we're all a bunch of jew-murdering hypocrites we just don't know it while steadfastly refusing to lift a finger to investigate the differences that separate the Holocaust from, say, the American genocide of Native Americans or the Turkish genocide of Armenians or the Japanese genocide of Chinese. I would go as far as calling it a bad book.

On the other hand, based on this discussion and a few other recommendations, I'm halfway through Dan Lyons' Disrupted, wherein fake Steve Jobs gets laid off as technology editor of Newsweek and takes a gig writing blogspam for an SEO factory. It's entertaining but more than anything it makes me celebrate the fact that I'm going on ten years without a "job."