I learned a lot. We can never have too many deep examinations of such horrors. If you want to better understand the risks of human civilization and tribalism, you should read this reckoning of Stalin and Hitler playing bloodthirsty, bigoted, totalitarian Calvinball against their own subjects and their neighbors.

I didn't totaly love the book. It's stuck in a weird place between academic history and general interest. As a work of research, synthesis, and forensic accounting this might be 5 stars. As literature, it's kind of a slog. The thesis may be academically important, but it puts an awkward stricture on the storytelling. And there's a persistant thread of corrective mythbusting, which can come across as petty score-settling to an outsider like me.

I generally like Snyder's worldview and stance as a historian. When his personality comes through in the writing, I appreciate it; I wish it happened more often.

The Numbers and Terms and Abstract sections are important. The Introduction is the worst part of the book. The Conclusion might be the best part. If you're in a hurry just read the endmatter. (The index is surprisingly incomplete/weak, though.)

It's nice there are maps but they don't always seem well-designed or well-placed. Some more charts could help, too; population maps, cumulative bodycounts, etc. Not everything is best expressed in paragraphs. Would love to see photos and reproductions of documents included, too.

Snyder includes a few first-person anecdotes (and they're very powerful) but this is mostly an administrative and tactical history. Perhaps because that's what's most objectively documented? But the storytelling suffers as a result. I suppose I understand why this doesn't read more like Solzhenitsyn, but I'd like to think there's a middle ground. It's also annoying how it bounces between chronology and geographical or topic-based storytelling

For a general history, it would be helpful to have a little more background on the various big men, how their views were shaped, how they came to power.

The book also leaves too much underexamined, partly by design, as its focus is death rather than suffering. But still, tell us where all these bullets are being manufactured. Tell us who operated and maintained the train lines. Tell us more about who all these troops were and where they came from. Tell us more about how these cities still operated, how civil society functioned with all this going on. These questions are acknowledged but barely examined, as Snyder seems to consider them off-topic.