Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a Holocaust survivor and read voraciously on the topic. This book absolutely requires a solid background on the history, because Snyder's analysis, while interesting, at times takes some flights of fancy and rejects the more widespread and accepted theories of the "Final Solution." If this is a first in-depth read on the Shoah, it would be a poor choice indeed. But for informed readers, Snyder makes some very interesting points and observations which can be profitably filtered through more conventional interpretations.One of his major threads is that the destruction of nation states by both the Nazis and the Soviet Union, such as Poland, Latvia and Estonia---anti-Semitic as they certainly were--deprived the Jews of any protection offered by even the minimal formerly existing laws, And thus, in stateless, and lawless societies, the path to mass murder was paved. Definitely not a basic text, but worth reading and thinking about.