{"product_id":"9781590178126","title":"Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War","description":"Winner of the PEN\/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIan Buruma is fascinated, he writes, “by what makes the human species behave atrociously.” In \u003ci\u003eTheater of Cruelty \u003c\/i\u003ethe acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eThe Wages of Guilt\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eYear Zero: A History of 1945 \u003c\/i\u003eonce  again turns to World War II to explore that question—to the Nazi  occupation of Paris, the Allied bombing of German cities, the  international controversies over Anne Frank’s diaries, Japan’s  militarist intellectuals and its kamikaze pilots. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne way that  people respond to power and cruelty, Buruma argues, is through art, and  the art that most interests him reveals the dark impulses beneath the  veneer of civilized behavior. This is what draws him to German and  Japanese artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig  Kirchner, Mishima Yukio, and Yokoo Tadanori, as well as to filmmakers  such as Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and  Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. All were affected by fascism and its terrible  consequences; all “looked into the abyss and made art of what they saw.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether  he is writing in this wide-ranging collection about war, artists, or  film—or about David Bowie’s music, R. Crumb’s drawings, the Palestinians  of the West Bank, or Asian theme parks—Ian Buruma brings sympathetic  historical insight and shrewd aesthetic judgment to understanding the  diverse ways that people deal with violence and cruelty in life and in  art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTheater of Cruelty\u003c\/i\u003e includes eight pages of color and black \u0026amp; white images.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47157563195632,"sku":"9781590178126","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781590178126_p0.jpg?v=1763806760","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781590178126","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}