SOURCE: Gewen, Barry. “Different Wars, Different Crimes.” New Leader 77, no. 6 (6-20 June 1994): 6-8.

In the following review, Gewen praises Buruma's subtle analysis of Germany and Japan's World War II legacy in The Wages of Guilt.

[The Wages of Guilt] seems to be a book that the talented journalist Ian Buruma was destined to write. In the Introduction, entitled “The Enemies,” he explains how, as a boy growing up in the postwar Netherlands, he learned to view the people who had over-run his nation a few years earlier as the embodiment of evil. Germans had sent his father away to work in their factories; they had tortured and murdered many of his countrymen; and, of course, they had practically annihilated Holland's Jewish community. Despite strong cultural ties, the Dutch turned their backs on their German neighbors in the 1950s and '60s. “Even in 1989,” Buruma reports, “when I began...