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In this spellbinding account of three World War Two collaborators, prize-winning historian Ian Buruma examines questions of truth as he investigates their complex and tangled lives.
A fascinating book, sometimes disturbing, sometimes entertaining, never dull.
A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma pulls it off magnificently, maintaining the distinct dramas, filleting fact from fiction with sympathy and balance, but maintaining the overarching psychological narrative. He never misses a mordant aside or a telling detail... Superb.
Fascinating... Buruma's powerful book is also a warning for our own times.
Richly enjoyable, vital and astute
Fascinating
Buruma's intriguing narrative reads like a spy thriller.
In his subtle, carefully constructed book, Ian Buruma weaves their stories into an unsettling tapestry.
The Collaborators is at once fascinating and frightening, an apposite tract for our increasingly mendacious, treacherous times. The accounts Ian Buruma gives of the lives and dark doings of three egregious collaborators starkly illustrate our depthless capacity for betrayal and subsequent self-justification; they are also fascinating life studies. It would be shocking to be entertained by such a book, but I was.
With impressive skill and meticulous research, Buruma has woven three very different wartime characters into a fascinating tale of alternative realities, riven by mythomania, perfidy and collusion.
Compulsively readable as always, Buruma has taken a riveting subject - collaboration - and delved deep into it, probing concepts of national identity, self-reinvention, loyalty and treason.
These unforgettable true stories from terrible days show ruthless survivors using all the tricks of stage farce - storytelling, double-crossing, cross-dressing - to avoid the firing squads or the gas chambers. The human comedy has never been so bleak - or so human.
Mythmakers, duplicitous self-aggrandizers and deluders star in these three wartime narratives of both East and West. Ian Buruma weaves their stories together with great skill and panache, all the while challenging "history" and our own time's elision of wish and truth.
We are slowly coming to an understanding that the Second World War is a more twisted tale than our black-and-white stories about heroes made us believe. The evil guys remain evil, but what about the good ones? Time allows us a more nuanced look, and The Collaborators does a formidable job at navigating the muddy waters of an epic battle that was a challenge to each person going through it - a challenge that truly makes for an interesting history.
At a time when manifold forms of authoritarianism are on the rise, this book could not be more welcome and necessary. By masterfully exploring the complicity, guilt and ambivalence pervading three parallel lives in imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and occupied Holland, Buruma conjures up and richly evokes a thick web of history, allowing contemporary readers to understand how easy it is to condone systematic violence and untold suffering in the name of misguided ideals.
Buruma sifts through his subjects' complex, multinational backgrounds in fluid prose and brings a welcome measure of sympathy to their lives without minimizing the repercussions of their actions. It's a captivating portrait of what happens when survival turns into self-deception.
Meticulously, relentlessly, Buruma dissects these collaborators' contradictory and self-serving accounts and cross-references with other sources to get closer to the truth. A powerful exploration of complicity, ambivalence, and the human capacity for deception and self-rationalization.
Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and New York. He is a regular contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker and writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate and Bloomberg. He is a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City.
A fascinating book, sometimes disturbing, sometimes entertaining, never dull.
A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma pulls it off magnificently, maintaining the distinct dramas, filleting fact from fiction with sympathy and balance, but maintaining the overarching psychological narrative. He never misses a mordant aside or a telling detail... Superb.
Fascinating... Buruma's powerful book is also a warning for our own times.
Richly enjoyable, vital and astute
Fascinating
Buruma's intriguing narrative reads like a spy thriller.
In his subtle, carefully constructed book, Ian Buruma weaves their stories into an unsettling tapestry.
The Collaborators is at once fascinating and frightening, an apposite tract for our increasingly mendacious, treacherous times. The accounts Ian Buruma gives of the lives and dark doings of three egregious collaborators starkly illustrate our depthless capacity for betrayal and subsequent self-justification; they are also fascinating life studies. It would be shocking to be entertained by such a book, but I was.
With impressive skill and meticulous research, Buruma has woven three very different wartime characters into a fascinating tale of alternative realities, riven by mythomania, perfidy and collusion.
Compulsively readable as always, Buruma has taken a riveting subject - collaboration - and delved deep into it, probing concepts of national identity, self-reinvention, loyalty and treason.
These unforgettable true stories from terrible days show ruthless survivors using all the tricks of stage farce - storytelling, double-crossing, cross-dressing - to avoid the firing squads or the gas chambers. The human comedy has never been so bleak - or so human.
Mythmakers, duplicitous self-aggrandizers and deluders star in these three wartime narratives of both East and West. Ian Buruma weaves their stories together with great skill and panache, all the while challenging "history" and our own time's elision of wish and truth.
We are slowly coming to an understanding that the Second World War is a more twisted tale than our black-and-white stories about heroes made us believe. The evil guys remain evil, but what about the good ones? Time allows us a more nuanced look, and The Collaborators does a formidable job at navigating the muddy waters of an epic battle that was a challenge to each person going through it - a challenge that truly makes for an interesting history.
At a time when manifold forms of authoritarianism are on the rise, this book could not be more welcome and necessary. By masterfully exploring the complicity, guilt and ambivalence pervading three parallel lives in imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and occupied Holland, Buruma conjures up and richly evokes a thick web of history, allowing contemporary readers to understand how easy it is to condone systematic violence and untold suffering in the name of misguided ideals.
Buruma sifts through his subjects' complex, multinational backgrounds in fluid prose and brings a welcome measure of sympathy to their lives without minimizing the repercussions of their actions. It's a captivating portrait of what happens when survival turns into self-deception.
Meticulously, relentlessly, Buruma dissects these collaborators' contradictory and self-serving accounts and cross-references with other sources to get closer to the truth. A powerful exploration of complicity, ambivalence, and the human capacity for deception and self-rationalization.
Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and New York. He is a regular contributor to Harper's and The New Yorker and writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate and Bloomberg. He is a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City.