We all learn about the Holocaust when we’re children. I learned about it when I was quite young, in grade school. Childhood lessons on the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in Germany often center on the most gruesome atrocities, the concentration camps and the ovens and the torture of people.
It is understandable why that is so. These things are so terrible to imagine, they seem to bear repeating to make sure that future generations know they happened.
But they are not the entirety of the horrors of the Holocaust. And there is a danger to the way these atrocities are so often taught to school children. They’re taught in such as way as to isolate them from our current reality, and that is dangerous because when we hear about them, we might believe that we live in a different time, where such things are the product of a madman’s racism, and being so singular, would never happen again.
We’d be wrong.
Continue reading “Review: Timothy Snyder Examines the Holocaust in Black Earth”
Spark is an incredibly important, exhaustively researched book that will fascinate anyone who is even remotely interested in how our brains work.
This slim volume is partly a guide to training for long distance running, part memoir of a writer’s life and career, part zen philosophy of life and death. I’ve heard it repeatedly described as “intimate” and “thoughtful” and it is both of these things, yet also it is more.