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 ... The sheer flamboyance of Mr. Buruma’s shape-shifters commands our attention.

Buruma has long demonstrated an ability to depict even horrific wartime events with remove ... In The Collaborators, some readers may find Buruma’s permissiveness toward his subjects’ conduct and moral barometers unnerving, even disturbing. The author painstakingly lays out the discrepant historical evidence surrounding their most egregious actions. Yet in some instances, the existing, court-admissable evidence against them appears damning ... Buruma details her early years with interest, but fails to adequately underscore the trauma of being relegated to probable sexual slavery by one’s own parents; nor does he sufficiently explore the full impact that this brutalization might have had on her actions throughout her brief life ... Buruma successfully uses the three narratives to warn us about reckless charlatans in power today, and against the ongoing peril of kakistocracies. Yet in drilling down on this central conceit, Buruma arrives at an odd, off-putting conclusion ... Buruma’s choice to focus on this supporting-cast roster of individuals is no misstep. What would be, however, is a failure to drive home the greater lessons and conundrums that their tragic lives present.

Meticulously, relentlessly, Buruma dissects these collaborators’ contradictory and self-serving accounts and cross-references with other sources to get closer to the truth ... A powerful exploration of complicity, ambivalence, and the human capacity for deception and self-rationalization.

This intriguing but rather disjointed book sets out to explore moral ambiguity and degrees of guilt ... It does so through the stories of three striking, self-mythologising and elusive figures.

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 ... I wanted many more photographs. There are just seven small and grainy images inserted into the text. Frustratingly, Buruma frequently describes pictures the reader cannot see ... A superb book.

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 ... Entertaining WWII minutia.

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.