Book review: Year Zero, by Ian Buruma
For a historian to shed original light on the events of the second world war and the ensuing cold war is no mean feat. To do so with character, insight, and intellect is even harder.
by Ian Buruma
The Penguin Press
5 stars
Amy Russell
For a historian to shed original light on the events of the second world war and the ensuing cold war is no mean feat. To do so with character, insight, and intellect is even harder.
Ian Buruma brings us a fascinating, exploratory, and fresh view of events that reshaped the world, providing a close look at Asia and Europe after the second world war - all this without the dry, complex or jargon-packed language you might expect of an academic.
Using his "father's story" to anchor Year Zero, Buruma presents a personal angle that brings home the human side of war, offering a collection of other people's first-hand accounts and drawing on often harrowing sources to expose frightening and tragic personal tales.
The New York-based professor presents meaningful questions such as "How did the world emerge from the wreckage" of the second world war?; "What happens when millions are starving, or bent on bloody revenge?", and "How are societies … put together again?"
In the emotional and psychological societal scars, the lingering hardships and horrors, Buruma explores what an "ending" for a war of such scale truly means. Focusing on the post-war collective desire for normalcy, he reveals the truth of a world that has changed forever: a world of displacement, demilitarisation and disillusion. "Return", for example, becomes a weighted word, ripe with mixed emotions and the complicated identities of people in the war and the identities they take home.