SOURCE: Moorehead, Caroline. “Asia's Crisis of Identity.” New Statesman and Society 2, no. 73 (27 October 1989): 33.

In the following review of God's Dust, Moorehead commends Buruma's anecdotal sketches but finds shortcomings in the book's “dense” scholarly passages and Buruma's failure to answer his own guiding questions.

Do McDonald's hamburgers and Dynasty make the Thais less Thai and the Japanese less Japanese? This question, how a country becomes modern without losing its sense of identity and culture, fascinated Ian Buruma long before he sat down to write this book [God's Dust]. On his many travels round the east he had grown increasingly irritated by the clichés that seemed to pursue him wherever he turned: that third world cities have been so westernised that to find the true east you have to go to the countryside, and that the material west and the spiritual east are clearly juxtaposed. In time, his irritation...