Ian Buruma

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war...

LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas...

A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency....

Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between. On the face of it, the three characters in this...

Winifred and Bernard inherited the high European cultural ideals and attitudes that came of being born into prosperous German-Jewish émigré families....

Murder in Amsterdam is a masterpiece of investigative journalism, a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a crime novel and the analytical brilliance for which Buruma is renowned....

“Stimulating and highly readable. . . . The Churchill Complex is a rich and rewarding book.” —Wall Street Journal From 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...

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

From Shanghai before and during the Second World War to US occupied Tokyo, and, finally, to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Ian Buruma's masterful novel about the intoxicating power of collective fantasy follows three star-struck men driven to extraordinary acts by their devotion to the same...

A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a...

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....