Before reading Bloodlands I thought I had a grasp of the general outline of the horrors inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Nope. Like many other Americans, I suppose, my ideas of WWII in Europe were formed (naturally enough) by accounts from a U.S. perspective, my ideas of the Holocaust by accounts of the experiences of bourgeois Jews from western Europe (e.g. and above all, Anne Frank). WWII viewed from such a perspective is like looking at certain 2-D projections of the globe which distort the world to flatter the mapmaker. Bloodlands revealed to me how narrow was my understanding of the scale of suffering, and more to the point where it occurred and who bore the brunt of it. In Timothy Snyder's geography of mass killing, the Bloodlands -- primarily eastern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine -- assume their rightful proportions. His discussion of the policies that led to the murder of 14 million people is lucid and deeply disturbing. A must-read.