Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
I agree that the last chapter (or the epilogue or whatever it is) feels forced, as if it were put in to make the book feel relevant in the current political climate. That said, Snyder and Judt were collaborators, so I doubt their views are that divergent. What I took away from Black Earth wasn't that we're all Jew killers waiting to be unleashed but rather the opposite. The basic thesis of the book is that statehood matters, citizenship matters, and that not even the Nazis could transcend that fact. I think that that thesis is generally true, but that also the Holocaust isn't so much of a generalizable (sp?) event, and that is perhaps where Snyder may come up short.