Year Zero, Ian Buruma
Year Zero, Ian Buruma
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

Year Zero
A History of 1945

Author: Ian Buruma

Narrator: Gildart Jackson

Unabridged: 14 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/26/2013


Synopsis

Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come across Asia and all of continental Europe. It was the greatest global power vacuum in history, and out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much darkness to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, American democracy, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Society-wide reeducation was imposed on the vanquished on a scale that had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill-advised, but in hindsight these efforts were relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout his history is Burumas own fathers story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a slave laborer and by wars end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into normalcy stand in many ways for his generations experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write.

About Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma is the author of several books, including A Tokyo Romance, Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism, God's Dust, Behind the Mask, The Wages of Guilt, Bad Elements, and Taming the Gods.


Reviews

Goodreads review by William2 on November 20, 2021

An unsummarizable book. Scabrous accounts of mass slaughter and genocide that I have not come across elsewhere. There’s a lot of subject matter covered here. Let me comment on just one thing. I have read many accounts of Jews returning home from the Nazi concentration camps. Primi Levi and other writ......more

Goodreads review by Victor on January 19, 2016

The book is trying to cover an enormous ground of post-WW2 chaos around the globe. It does a decent job overall, but the monumental nature of the task is certainly beyond the scope of a 400-page treatise. And there lie Year Zero's strength and shortcoming: the book is concise but superficial. I like......more

Goodreads review by Clif on May 04, 2021

The year 1945 was year zero for me personally since I was born that year. I have generally assumed that it was a happy year since it included both the end of World War II and my birth. This book helped me learn that the year 1945 was filled with a complex mix of exultation, hunger, revenge and hope.......more

Goodreads review by Jim on November 24, 2013

In his recent review of this book Charles Simic observed, "Perhaps the reason we never learn from history is that we are incapable of picturing the reality of war and its aftermath, for fear that if we did, we would stop believing both in God and in our fellow human beings." This is not hyperbole. I......more

Goodreads review by Yigal on July 18, 2019

amazing book. there is so much written on second world war but so few on what happened in the year or two which followed after. when million of people where moving around with no home to go back to, with no purpose in life with past destroyed. so much despair around. i found this as a great and amaz......more