The Collaborators

October 1, 2022

In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2022
The seemingly unrelated stories of three World War II-era figures who "embellish[ed] their biogra-phies with exotic tales of adventure." Buruma's subjects didn't know each other, had little influence on history, looked after their own interests in occupied nations, and lied about it afterward. The author, who has written numerous books about this era, notes that "none of the three was utterly depraved. They were all too human, especially in their frailties. Similar frailties can be seen in many figures strutting around the public sphere today." Having spent perhaps too much effort justifying the significance of his subjects, he proceeds to write an enjoyable book that will appeal to WWII buffs. Felix Kersten (1898-1962) spent World War I in the German army, ending the war in Finland, where he studied physical therapy before moving to Berlin. A charismatic figure, he grew wealthy as a practitioner of healing massage, serving many highly placed figures, including Heinrich Himmler. Safely ensconced in Sweden after the war, he proclaimed (and a gullible biographer agreed) that he had used his influence to save anti-Nazis and Jews. Buruma expresses understandable skepticism. In Holland, which was decimated by the Nazis, Friedrich Weinreb (1910-1988) survived by convincing them that he could find Jews in hiding while also collecting money from Jews with the false promise of keeping them from deportation. He served three years in prison, but, an aggressive self-promoter, he later convinced many that he was a hero of the resistance scapegoated by the establishment. Perhaps the most bizarre of the trio was Kawashima Yoshiko (c. 1906-1948), daughter of a Chinese aristocrat who gave her up for adoption to a Japanese official. Raised and educated in Japan, she was a flamboyant figure who dressed in men's clothes and whose aggressive support of that nation's conquests in Manchuria and China made her a popular figure in Japanese media during the 1930s. She sat out the years after Pearl Harbor in Beijing, after which a vengeful Chinese government executed her for treason. Entertaining WWII minutia.

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January 23, 2023
In this illuminating and variegated group biography, Buruma (The Churchill Complex) reconsiders three notorious WWII figures: Felix Kersten, the “plump bon vivant” who became S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler’s masseur and confidant; Friedrich Weinreb, a Hasidic Jew who betrayed some of the Dutch Jews who paid him to save them from deportation to the concentration camps; and Kawashima Yoshiko, a “cross-dressing Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese secret police in China.” Writing that all three “reinvented themselves in a time of war, persecution, and mass murder, where moral choices often had fatal consequences but were rarely as straightforward as we were told to believe after the dangers had lifted,” Buruma documents how his protagonists downplayed German and Japanese atrocities and self-mythologized their own acts of resistance and courage. Kersten, for example, falsely claimed credit for dissuading Himmler from deporting the entire Dutch population to eastern Europe, while Yoshiko helped spread propaganda casting the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo as a peaceful and modern “Asian utopia.” Buruma sifts through his subjects’ complex, multinational backgrounds in fluid prose and brings a welcome measure of sympathy to their lives without minimizing the repercussions of their actions. It’s a captivating portrait of what happens when survival turns into self-deception. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

February 1, 2023
Buruma solidifies his prominence in the effort to separate fact from fiction regarding WWII as he investigates the lives of three notorious, much-mythologized individuals. Kawashima Yoshiko was a gender-fluid Manchu princess, movie star, agent provocateur, and Japanese spy during Japan's attacks on China. Felix Kersten, a Finn, was SS head Heinrich Himmler's personal masseur. Friedrich Weinreb, a Hasidic Jew and scholar, fled Ukraine during WWI, alighting in the Netherlands, where he betrayed other Jews. Buruma alternates biographical accounts with presentations of evidence refuting the self-serving claims of his wily subjects. This complicated book is full of accounts of life in prewar and wartime Germany, Japan, China, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands rich in details not found in other works about these events. Buruma's descriptions of such things as Kersten's massage techniques and Yoshiko's cross-dressing and reincarnation in Japanese manga, his commentary on how people create their own realities, and his cautionary conclusion, "By turning your life into a fiction, you don't really have an identity at all," infuse this deeply inquisitive study of fabrication and self-preservation with up-to-the-minute relevance.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2023

Former editor of the New York Times Review of Books, Buruma (The Churchill Complex) writes history like drama, and this book is no exception. The work is a character study of three collaborators with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, whose jumbled identities and solipsistic, yet strangely convincing, fantasies resonate in the present era of alternative facts and mythomania. Felix Kersten, a Finnish Jew, worked as personal masseur to Heinrich Himmler, an architect of the Holocaust. Friedrich Weinreb swindled thousands of other Dutch Jews, taking their money in exchange for protecting them from deportation to the concentration camps--protection that he was in no position to offer. Weinreb and Kersten both claimed to have saved many Jews from the Nazis, but their stories are riddled with exaggerations and fabrications. The third collaborator is Kawashima Yoshiko (Chinese name: Aisin Gyoro Xianyu), a Manchu princess who aided and spied for the Japanese and whom the Chinese shot for treason after World War II. Meticulously, relentlessly, Buruma dissects these collaborators' contradictory and self-serving accounts and cross-references with other sources to get closer to the truth. VERDICT A powerful exploration of complicity, ambivalence, and the human capacity for deception and self-rationalization.--Michael Rodriguez

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.