So much sleaze oozes out of the morally compromised subjects in Ian Buruma’s disquieting group portrait... that nearly every page leaves a stain of betrayal.

Buruma has long demonstrated an ability to depict even horrific wartime events with remove.

Meticulously, relentlessly, Buruma dissects these collaborators’ contradictory and self-serving accounts and cross-references with other sources to get closer to the truth.

This intriguing but rather disjointed book sets out to explore moral ambiguity and degrees of guilt.

A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma, an Anglo-Dutch author and former editor of the New York Review of Books, pulls it off magnificently, maintaining the distinct dramas, filleting fact from fiction with sympathy and balance, but maintaining the overarching psychological narrative. He never misses a mordant aside or a telling detail.

Having spent perhaps too much effort justifying the significance of his subjects, [Buruma] proceeds to write an enjoyable book that will appeal to WWII buffs.

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..