Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand...
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in t...
Buruma's prismatic, fascinating first novel is a portrait of Ranji, the cricket player who was "not simply the greatest cricketer of all time, but a fairy tale prince . . . so famous that children sang songs about him, and grown men wept when they saw him play." Buruma weaves the adventures of an unnamed narrator together with a (fictional) undiscovered memoir of Ranji to create a witty and reverbatory meditation on England, India and the post-colonial sense of self.
Buruma's prismatic, fascinating first novel is a portrait of Ranji, the cricket player who was "not simply the greatest cricketer of all time, but a f...
From Naipaul's India to the last days of Hong Kong, and from the ghosts of Pearl Harbor to Benazir Bhutto, Buruma delivers an engaging and incisive look at the ways East and West understand-and misunderstand-each other. At home in both worlds, Buruma traverses the realms of journalism, literary criticism, and political analysis, to examine the dialogue of fact and fantasy that affects our perception of far-away lands. Whether deconstructing the films of Satyajit Ray or the novels of Yoshimoto Banana, Buruma offers a splendid counterbalance to fashionable theories of clashing civilizations...
From Naipaul's India to the last days of Hong Kong, and from the ghosts of Pearl Harbor to Benazir Bhutto, Buruma delivers an engaging and incisive lo...
Essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese culture, this unsurpassed masterwork opens an intriguing window on Japan. Benedict s World War IIera study paints an illuminating contrast between the culture of Japan and that of the United States. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a revealing look at how and why our cultures differ, making it the perfect introduction to Japanese history and customs."
Essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese culture, this unsurpassed masterwork opens an intriguing window on Japan. Benedict s World War IIe...
In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and...
In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as dramatic a...
From Shanghai before and during the Second World War to U.S. occupied Tokyo, and, finally, to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Ian Buruma's masterful novel about the intoxicating power of collective fantasy follows three star-struck men driven to extraordinary acts by their devotion to the same legendary woman. A beautiful Japanese girl born in Manchuria, Yamaguchi Yoshiko is known as Ri Koran in Japan, Li Xianglan in China, and Shirley Yamaguchi in the U.S., and her past is a closely guarded secret. In Buruma's reimagining of the life of Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a Japanese girl torn between...
From Shanghai before and during the Second World War to U.S. occupied Tokyo, and, finally, to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Ian Buruma's masterf...
"I love freedom and I will long for the freedom of the soul and the dignity of being a human being for the rest of my life. I'm not the first nor am I the last to suffer or even to sacrifice a life to that idea. Prior to my imprisonment, I didn't try to curry favor, and now that I am in prison I don't intend to beg for mercy--both of which to me are acts more painful than being imprisoned or dying in prison." -- From Dai Qing's "Last Words," scribbled in the hope that someone in the future would read her last thoughts, after she was told she was on a list of prisoners slated for...
"I love freedom and I will long for the freedom of the soul and the dignity of being a human being for the rest of my life. I'm not the first nor a...
"I love freedom and I will long for the freedom of the soul and the dignity of being a human being for the rest of my life. I'm not the first nor am I the last to suffer or even to sacrifice a life to that idea. Prior to my imprisonment, I didn't try to curry favor, and now that I am in prison I don't intend to beg for mercy--both of which to me are acts more painful than being imprisoned or dying in prison." -- From Dai Qing's "Last Words," scribbled in the hope that someone in the future would read her last thoughts, after she was told she was on a list of prisoners slated for...
"I love freedom and I will long for the freedom of the soul and the dignity of being a human being for the rest of my life. I'm not the first nor a...
