The Devils’ Playground (Published 2010)Homeless peasants near Kiev in 1934, during the famine engineered by Stalin.Credit...Hulton Archive/Getty Images For most Americans, who remember World War II as beginning in 1941, it is necessary to recall that Europe had succumbed to an infatuation with violence long before the United States entered the conflict. Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, compels us to look squarely at the
