When is a bad book important? When it tackles an important topic, for one thing, something meaty and emotional such as, say, Nazism and the Holocaust. Another is when its arguments resonate, when they capture the imagination of a segment of the reading public and shape thinking in some significant way.

One such book was Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which argued that the real reason for the death of six million Jews was not Nazism per se but an “eliminationist” mindset that had taken hold of the German psyche decades earlier and that only Americanization could expunge — music to the ears, needless to say, of fans of “the indispensable nation.”

A more recent example is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a high-voltage account of Eastern Europe’s bloody travails between 1933 and 1945. Bloodlands made it onto the bestseller lists in America, Germany, and Poland, racked up numerous awards, and has been translated into some twenty-six languages. The praise has been lavish. Anne Applebaum called it “brave and original” in the New York Review of Books, Samuel Moyn said that it was “a remarkable, even triumphant accomplishment” in the Nation, Adam Hochschild described it as “immensely valuable” in Harper’s, while Neal Ascherson lauded Snyder in the Guardian as “a noble writer as well as a great researcher.”