The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West - Hardcover

The author of Anglomania explores the synergy between Eastern and Western thought in this collection of twenty-five insightful and eclectic essays on topics ranging from biographical profiles and popular culture to literary criticism. 12,500 first printing.

s Westerners have projected fan-tasies of a decadent, voluptuous East in contrast to the puritanism of their own cultures. A Japanese theatrical troupe performing in his native Holland in 1971 exposed the young Ian Buruma to these temptations, and soon he was off to Tokyo, a would-be libertine. The essays collected in The Missionary and the Libertine chronicle Buruma's sobering discovery that Asians often have equally distorted visions of the West.

In these humorous and enlightening essays, Buruma describes the last days of Hong Kong, the showbiz politics of the Philippines, the chauvinism of the Seoul Olympics, the sinister genius of Lee Kuan Yew, the intricacies of Japanese sexuality, and much more. His portraits of Benazir Bhutto, Imelda Marcos, Satyajit Ray, and Corazón Aquino are classics of the journalist's art.

Buruma shows that the cultural gap between East and West is not as wide as either missionaries or libertines, in East or West, might think. A