Ian Buruma has been one of my favortie crtics on Japan and Asia in general with such books as God's Dust, Behind The Mask, The Missionary and the Libertine, and Inventing Japan. He has shown range by writing about Chinese dissidents in Bad Elelments, and postwar guilt in Japan and Germany in The Wages of Guilt, and the clash of the East with the West in Occidentalism. He is great writer who is excellent in his research and understanding of a situation, therefore I am looking forward to reading his new book that delves further into the divide of East and West when he looks at the murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gough by a Muslim extremist in his latest, Murder in Amsterdam, which is reveiwed in Salon:
Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance" places van Gogh's murder at the fulcrum of Dutch politics and society at the turn of the 21st century. A better book about the contemporary Netherlands has not been written. Like van Gogh, Buruma grew up well off in The Hague of the 1960s and '70s, and he brings to his portrait the deep understanding one can only have for those from one's native town and class. But Buruma has lived outside Holland since 1975, and has written extensively on the Far East and, more recently, the worldwide clash between political Islam and the secular West. These two perspectives, particular and global, interweave throughout "Murder in Amsterdam," in the classic fashion of the murder story as social investigation -- one thinks of "In Cold Blood," or the Dylan song "Who Killed Davey Moore?" As in the song, a lot of people turn out to bear some responsibility for van Gogh's death, and few of them are willing to own up to it.
better than David Winner's "Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football"?
Posted by: joeyredpine | September 29, 2006 at 10:17 AM
Well, I can't vouch for that, but this looks good...
Posted by: MC | September 29, 2006 at 05:00 PM