Book review: Theater of Cruelty, by Ian Buruma
"I did not want to be an 'Asia hand', forever explaining the manners and mores of countries about which most of my readers would know even less than I did," Ian Buruma writes in this collection of his essays from The New York Review of Books.
by Ian Buruma
The New York Review of Books
"I did not want to be an 'Asia hand', forever explaining the manners and mores of countries about which most of my readers would know even less than I did," Ian Buruma writes in this collection of his essays from The New York Review of Books.
While he has vast experience in Asia - working as a documentary filmmaker and photographer in Tokyo in the 1970s and as cultural editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong in the 1980s - Buruma needn't worry about being pigeon-holed. Readers tell him: "You write about so many things."
Dated from 1987 to 2013, the 28 pieces deal with a wide range of topics. But there are certain preoccupations or passions to which the author keeps returning.
Buruma is fascinated by a subject that lends a shape to this collection: what makes the human species behave atrociously. "Animals kill other animals for food, and some animals turn on their own kind out of rivalry. But only humans commit acts of extreme and often senseless violence, sometimes out of malign pleasure," he writes.
The author of The Wages of Guilt and Year Zero: A History of 1945 once again turns to the second world war to explore the question - to the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Allied bombing of German cities, the controversies over Anne Frank's diaries, Japan's militarist intellectuals, and its kamikaze pilots.