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Year Zero: A History Of 1945 (2013)

by Ian Buruma(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1594204365 (ISBN13: 9781594204364)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

The Penguin Press/Penguin Group (USA) LLC

review 1: We like to think of history as a long salami: rectilinear and to be cut up in easily digested slices. Ian Buruma's "Year Zero" shows that reality is messier and more complex. The first year after the end of WWII, far from being a tranquil oasis of peace, was turbulent and difficult. The author has a global view, and takes the reader from the independence struggle in Indonesia to the leaders of the Polish resistance trying to create a new Polish state from the ashes (and being killed by the Soviets for that same reason). Particular attention is giving to Germany and Japan, where denazification was often at odds with the need to create a functioning society or the strategic imperatives of the incipient Cold War. It may be shocking for some readers to realise just how many wa... morer criminals managed to hang on to their influential positions (some of them even making it to Prime Minister of their country). Buruma has the broad view of a big-picture historian, but brings it to life with his empathy for the people living the specific circumstances. The book begins and closes beautifully with a story about his father, who, as a former POW in Germany had to make his way back home in that remarkable year.
review 2: This is a very personal book, undertaken by the author to shed light on the world that his parents (a Dutch man and an English woman) entered at the end of World War II. I picked up the book expecting that it would focus on the politics of that year: the creation of the United Nations, the anti-colonial stirrings, the occupation of the defeated nations, the beginning of the Cold War. And the book does get around to those things…...eventually. But it begins with more of what I would call a psychological look at the immediate postwar period. In American history, the post-World War II era is presented as an era of progress: the economy grew, the suburbs were built, the civil rights of African-Americans were attended to. Whatever personal problems that Americans had to address because of the war were individual, not collective, problems. However, in the parts of the world were the war had been fought, the end of the war created issues that were often horrible, even horrific, yet understandable. The first three chapters are titled "Exultation," "Hunger," and "Revenge," and deal with things like rape, prostitution, and the punishment of collaborators. In the United States, we had no difficulty distinguishing the "good guys" from the "bad guys," but that was not so easy in Europe, especially in the Borderlands of Eastern Europe, where the conflicts and violence of the Nazi-Soviet war were laid over centuries of ethnic animosities (and whose repercussions can still be seen in the Ukraine crisis of 2014). There is a very interesting chapter called "Homecoming," which discusses the return of not only the veterans to their respective nations, but also the prisoners of war, and a section that describes how quickly many former enemies were rehabilitated in an attempt to bring stability to the post war period (if only this book had been published before 2003 and members of the Bush Administration had read it before our Iraq adventure). In the end, like Steven Spielberg has done with his World War II movies, Buruma's book is a statement of admiration for the members of his parents' generation, and their ability to create, out of the wreckage of World War II, the world that he grew up in. less

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