SOURCE: Gass, William H. “Who Is to Blame?” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 June 1994): 1, 8-9.

In the following review, Gass offers a positive assessment of The Wages of Guilt.

The shameful memory market, where Ian Buruma's remarkable book [The Wages of Guilt] takes us, has many stalls. Perhaps there has been in the whole of history no more murderous an age, no period more productive of pain—of death, dislocation and despair—than our own century. Our civilization has found new ways to go mad, contrived fresh methods of mass destruction, gone to wars as if wars were parties, and created several calamities to signal that it has outdone nature's most glamorous disasters.

Consequently, like the plume of the Bomb, guilt's contamination grows. Commencing at ground zero, the guilty are, first, those who did it; second, those who ordered it done; third, those who made possible its doing...