Book Review: 'Year Zero' by Ian Buruma

How do you sum up a global human experience of a single year, especially an epochal year like 1945?

Sept. 27, 2013 5:07 p.m. ET

Ian Buruma has tackled the impossible. How do you sum up, in language devoid of complexity or jargon, a global human experience that transcends the clichéd vernacular? If you write about 1945, the year the world's hot war ended and the incipient cold war turned colder, you have to deal with a myriad of simply indescribable situations: among them genocide, carpet bombing, atomic annihilation and a flood-tide of desperation on a scale never imagined let alone described in any comprehensive fashion. "I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world," Eisenhower wrote...

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