life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.” Snyder explains that “to join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history.” Snyder ends his book with a plea to academics and fellow historians, to all those who grapple with death on a grand scale. “It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to
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