I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust. If you do a search for the word “Holocaust” on Amazon (as I just did), you get 18,445 results. That’s just in English, and just books available right now on Amazon. Admittedly this is a poor search strategy to use if constructing a bibliography, but it gives you a decent approximation of the challenge you face in trying to learn about the Holocaust.

Dan Stone, then, has done the field a great service in writing his book Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010. In this work, Stone attempts to provide a critical guide to the questions and interpretations most important to the field at this moment. In doing so, he summarizes an enormous amount of reading and learning into a couple hundred pages while offering his own thoughtful interpretations. This book is one of the first places to start if you want to get an overview of recent scholarship on the holocaust.

A brief note about the sound quality of the interview. Skype was a bit wonky (to use the technical term) the day we did the interview, so the sound during the first ten or twelve minutes or so is just a bit fuzzy. After that it clears up and the remainder of the interview is crystal clear.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

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