Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the story of what happened when World War II ended. It covers events around the world but is limited in focus to what happened in 1945, although events in the future, such as the Cold War and the founding of the state of Israel, are sometimes discussed in relation to what happened in 1945. This is a very ambitious goal, and the book for the most part succeeds, but it is hard to develop any sense of a narrative with such a broad scope.

Each chapter in the book focuses on a particular topic, such as hunger, sending the millions of displaced people home, or the founding of the United Nations and tries to explain what happened and why. This organization of the book again tends to work against a narrative, but it’s probably the only way to cover such topics on a global scale.

One of the things that helps bring the story back to a human scale is that the author relates the stories of his parents. His father was a Dutch law student who wound up in a labor camp in Germany and was in Berlin at the end of the war. His mother was a school girl in Great Britain and her story sheds light on the plight of the British, who were among the victors in 1945 but who had to endure rationing for several years after the war as their price for victory.

As I said, it’s a very interesting book and well worth reading. For me it fills a gap between the end of hostilities in Europe and Asia and the post-war world.