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WHAT TO READ NOW: When Civilization Fails
With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million people-catastrophe on a global scale, in which collapsing power structures left people exposed to unmitigated violence. Each of the three books below explores a different way a civilization can fail, reminding us how thin is the thread by which humanity hangs over the abyss, and how it is only by confronting our own nature that we can try to prevent the past from happening again.
Anna Bikont
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
Trans. Alissa Valles
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
"There's something in man" says one of the Holocaust survivors in Anna Bikont's book, "that makes him like killing" Part memoir, part investigative journalism, The Crime and the Silence is an informed and gut-wrenching reconstruction of July 10, 1941, when the Jewish residents...