{"title":"Ian Buruma","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the insightful works of Ian Buruma, a keen observer of culture, politics, and history. Ideal for readers seeking thought-provoking non-fiction and a global perspective. Start your intellectual journey here.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"year-zero-book-ian-buruma-9781848879393","title":"Year Zero","description":"Many books have been written, and continue to be written, about the Second World War: military histories, histories of the Holocaust, the war in Asia, or collaboration and resistance in Europe. Few books have taken a close look at the immediate aftermath of the worldwide catastrophe.  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If construction follows destruction, Year Zero describes that extraordinary moment in between, when people faced the wreckage, full of despair, as well as great hope. 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But \"the West\" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of \"the West\" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e We generally understand \"radical Islam\" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders--often Jews--pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of \"blood and soil.\" The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A work of extraordinary range and erudition, \u003cb\u003eOccidentalism\u003c\/b\u003e will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49510269124881,"sku":"GOR007310027","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49763040690449,"sku":"CIN0143034871G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345579643153,"sku":"CIN0143034871A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999432937745,"sku":"NIN9780143034872","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52102926631185,"sku":"CIN0143034871VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53205764964625,"sku":"GOR002032127","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143034871.jpg?v=1750876470"},{"product_id":"collaborators-book-ian-buruma-9781838957650","title":"The Collaborators","description":"'A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma pulls it off magnificently.' Ben Macintyre, The Times  On the face of it, the three characters here seem to have little in common - aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point.   Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler's indispensable personal masseur - Himmler calling him his 'magic Buddha'. Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a traitor and a con artist, he is still regarded by supporters as the 'Dutch Dreyfus'.   All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat tale of angels and devils. In telling their often-self-invented stories, The Collaborators offers a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these fantasists and what will always remain out of reach. 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Buruma allows these opposing voices to reveal how an obsession with the past, especially distorted versions of it, continually causes us to question who should indeed pay the wages of guilt.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49514003235089,"sku":"GOR003266317","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735588413713,"sku":"NGR9781843549604","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50099607732497,"sku":"GOR008464566","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50498450555153,"sku":"CIN1843549603G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50888509227281,"sku":"GOR008796917","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107638014225,"sku":"CIN1843549603VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1843549603.jpg?v=1758966567"},{"product_id":"tokyo-romance-book-ian-buruma-9781782397991","title":"A Tokyo Romance","description":"When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo as a young film student in 1975, he found a feverish and surreal metropolis in the midst of an economic boom, where everything seemed new and history only remained in fragments.   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A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him, and a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic and sexual.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49514879713553,"sku":"GOR009222316","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53022820991249,"sku":"GOR009314101","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53147177550097,"sku":"GOR011473511","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/178239799X.jpg?v=1759230017"},{"product_id":"bad-elements-book-ian-buruma-9780753816998","title":"Bad Elements","description":"'I believe that Communist Party rule will end in China; sooner or later all dynasties do. 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Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political reeducation was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into normalcy stand in many ways for his generation's experience. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, \u003ci\u003e Year Zero\u003c\/i\u003e is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49528579948817,"sku":"GOR007392574","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50333619159313,"sku":"CIN1594204365VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50385759371537,"sku":"CIN1594204365A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52106874323217,"sku":"CIN1594204365G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1594204365.jpg?v=1751245173"},{"product_id":"churchill-complex-book-ian-buruma-9780525522201","title":"The Churchill Complex","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom one of its keenest observers, a brilliant, witty journey through the Special Relationship between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War I to Brexit.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt is impossible to understand the last seventy-five years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, particularly the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Winston Churchill; JFK had Harold Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ronald Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Margaret Thatcher; and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. Today, the bond between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson illuminates the populist uprisings in both countries, as well as a new kind of Special Relationship that goes against everything it once stood for. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRemembering the past, even its most glorious moments, can be as misleading as forgetting it. Over and over, in the name of freedom and democracy, British and especially American leaders have evoked Winston Churchill as a model for brave leadership (and Nevillle Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling, short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the myths of World War I too often resulted in bad policies and foolish wars. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBut \u003ci\u003eThe Churchill Complex \u003c\/i\u003eis much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart are shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy, and the personal quirks of our leaders. It has never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill's desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on his side in World War I, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts. After the loss of its once-great empire, Britain clung to the world's greatest superpower as a path to continued relevance and leverage. 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In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders--often Jews--pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of blood and soil. 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