Timothy Snyder, author of the widely successful book Black Earth, believes we have misunderstood the Holocaust and the essential lessons it should have taught us. If the Holocaust was indeed, as Snyder’s carefully constructed argument will demonstrate, a result of ecological panic and state destruction, then our misunderstanding of it has endangered our own future. The world of the early twenty-first century resembles the world of the early twentieth more than we realize—and some of our own sensibilities are closer to those of Europeans of the 1930s than we might like to think.