Books like Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

01

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred history read.

02

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred history read.

03

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Homo Deus picks up where Sapiens left off, but turns to face the other direction.

A kindred history read.

04

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann · History

Charles Mann's 1491 sets out to correct a widespread misconception: that the Americas before Columbus were a mostly empty wilderness populated by small, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers living in gentle harmony with an untouched nature.

Both dig into ecology.

05

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen · History

Hitler's Willing Executioners is Daniel Goldhagen's argument that the Holocaust was made possible by a specifically German form of antisemitism — what he calls "eliminationist antisemitism" — that was so deeply embedded in German culture by the twentieth century that ordinary Germans participated in the genocide willingly, not reluctantly, and often with evident enthusiasm.

Both dig into the holocaust.

06

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder · History

On Tyranny is Timothy Snyder's brief handbook drawn from the history of twentieth-century authoritarianism.

Both dig into political institutions.

07

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Christopher R. Browning · History

Ordinary Men is Christopher Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of middle-aged German men — not hardened SS officers but Hamburg policemen with civilian lives and families — who between 1942 and 1943 shot approximately 38,000 Jewish men, women, and children in occupied Poland and deported another 45,000 to the Treblinka death camp.

Both dig into the holocaust.

08

Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama · History

Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of Francis Fukuyama's ambitious two-volume study of political development.

Both dig into political institutions.

09

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

William McDonough & Michael Braungart · Science

Cradle to Cradle is William McDonough and Michael Braungart's argument that the conventional approach to environmentalism — reducing, reusing, recycling, being "less bad" — is insufficient and in some ways misleading.

Both dig into ecology.

10

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake · Science

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist who has spent his career studying fungi, and Entangled Life is his account of what fungi are, what they do, and why most people who think they know something about the natural world understand almost nothing about this kingdom of life.

Both dig into ecology.

11

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson · Science

Silent Spring, published in 1962, is Rachel Carson's investigation of the effects of synthetic pesticides — particularly DDT and related organochlorines — on birds, fish, insects, and the broader ecological web.

Both dig into ecology.

12

Spillover

David Quammen · Science

Spillover is David Quammen's exhaustive investigation into zoonotic disease — illness that jumps from animals to humans — and the ecological and evolutionary logic behind why such spillover events happen.

Both dig into ecology.