November 30, 2015
Veteran voice actor Bramhall gives a sturdy and compelling reading of Snyder’s riveting examination of the rise and implementation of the Holocaust. The book offers a detailed analysis of how the collapse—rather than the excess—of Central and Eastern European nation-state power (a collapse instigated by both the Nazis and Soviets) led to the Holocaust. Bramhall does a fine job as narrator. The complexity of the author’s argument poses a challenge, but Bramhall’s focused yet conversational delivery holds the listener’s attention throughout. Most effective is his unflinching portrayal of the stories of those who suffered horrendously and died, not just at the hands of the Nazis, but from their neighbors and supposed friends. A Crown/Duggan hardcover.
Starred review from June 29, 2015
This brilliant book—effectively a companion volume to Snyder’s critically acclaimed 2010 work, Bloodlands—focuses on the Jewish victims of the grotesque policies of the Nazis and their shifting allies in the lands contested by Germans, Soviets, Poles, and others in the years of the Holocaust. Snyder brings two fresh elements to his dizzying, harrowing tale. The first is his extraordinarily wide and deep research into the remarkable stories, many unknown, of individual Holocaust survivors, the subject of the last half of his book. The second element, likely to be controversial, is his argument, asserted and reasserted, that, at its roots, the Holocaust was made possible by the failure of national states—by the Soviets
and the Nazis stripping public, legal protections from millions of people, who were thus left exposed to removal and death. Hence the “warning” of the book’s subtitle: the weakening of strong national states threatens human survival wherever it occurs, as it did in the case of the Anschluss, in which Germany absorbed Austria, and as it did in the case of the destruction of the Polish state. It’s a plausible, strong argument aimed sharply at Americans who believe that “freedom is the absence of state authority.” Maps.