*Bloodlands*

The author is Timothy Snyder and the subtitle is Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  I learned that this period was even bloodier and more brutal than I had thought:

Mass killing in Europe is usually associated with the Holocaust, and the Holocaust with rapid industrial killing.  The image is too simple and clean.  At the German and Soviet killing sites, the methods of murder were rather primitive.  Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food.  Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the twentieth century.

It is a very powerful book and I can recommend this review and this review.  Along somewhat related lines, some of you may wish to read Paul R. Gregory's Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina.  Bukharin, of course, was also an economist.  Here is Gregory on the book.  Here is Gregory on Germany's currently low unemployment rate.