“Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War” by Ian Buruma

The always intimidating Ian Buruma (check out his resume) just released his eleventy-millionth book and he’ll be talking about it Feb. 3. “Their Promised Land” recounts the trials faced by Buruma’s grandparents during the first and second World Wars. It doesn’t get much more interesting than this folks:

During the almost six years England was at war with Nazi Germany, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger, Ian Buruma’s grandparents, and the film director John Schlesinger’s parents, were, like so many others, thoroughly sundered from each other. Their only recourse was to write letters back and forth. And write they did, often every day. In a way they were just picking up where they left off in 1918, at the end of their first long separation because of the Great War that swept Bernard away to some of Europe’s bloodiest battlefields. The thousands of letters between them were part of an inheritance that ultimately came into the hands of their grandson, Ian Buruma.

Read more at the Penguin-Random House website.

Buruma’s talk will take place in Room 602, Hamilton Hall, on Columbia’s campus.