Ian Buruma is the author of The Missionary and the Libertine, Murder in Amsterdam, Year Zero: A History of 1945, and Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War, winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. His new book, Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War, is an account of a love sustained through the terror and separation of two world wars and the thousands of love letters sent in the darkest hours of the century.