September 7, 2015
NEW HAVEN — When Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” was published in 2010, it quickly established its author as one of the leading historians of his generation, a scholar who combined formidable linguistic skills — he reads or speaks 11 languages — with an elegant literary style, white-hot moral passion and a willingness to start arguments about some of the most fraught questions of the recent past.
It also established Mr. Snyder, 46, as a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present, most notably in his full-throated defense of Ukraine in the face of what he has called Russian president Vladimir V. Putin’s “assault on European history.”
Those two sides of Mr. Snyder’s work are fused in his new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” Here, Mr. Snyder aims to offer a radically new explanation of the Nazi genocide grounded in Hitler’s belief in a global ecological crisis caused by the Jews, while also sounding an alarm about how our own era of environmental disruption could lead to similar orgies of violence.