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 enlarge | Author: Nicholson Baker
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $6.05
You Save: $23.95 (80%)
New (58) Used (41) Collectible (2) from $6.05
Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 126795
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 1416567844
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5311
EAN: 9781416567844
ASIN: 1416567844
Publication Date: March 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Good Condition: may have light corner bends, scuff marks, wear to dust cover, etc. 100% of your purchase supports Goodwill Industries of San Diego County
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 Commissioned by Code Pink,? March 20, 2008
18 out of 106 found this review helpful
No doubt this cynical and manipulative exercise in moral equivalency will soon be adopted as part of the core history curriculum in America's public high schools, squeezed in between the plight of the Palestinians and the creed of global warming.
 A controversial look at mass slaughter... March 18, 2008
42 out of 48 found this review helpful
Nicholson Baker has never shunned controversy. His two most infamous books of fiction, "The Fermata" and "Vox," evoke a continuum of reactions ranging from morbid curiosity to recoiling disgust. The latter exposed him to the masses when Monica Lewinsky admitted giving a copy to then President Clinton. But Baker's range extends beyond novels. An interest in history also pervades his oeuvre. "Lumber," an earlier essay, explored etymology. On a much grander scale, "Human Smoke" traces threads of history through selective documented events and an aphoristic, almost Nietzschean, style. Beginning in 1892, with a tiny passage concerning Alfred Nobel's dynamite, the book juxtaposes European war and racial policies and attitudes with the effect these policies had on society at large through December 31, 1941. The book has an agenda. It attempts to depict the events of World War II's early years through a different filter. Via this technique this textual collage constructs an alternate history. One that, in many ways, does not always gel with mainstream ideas of the twentieth century's bloodiest conflict. With this interpretation, Baker once again delves deep into controversy.
The first 10 pages already reveal an atypical World War II story. Shocking anti-semitic actions by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt mingle with tales of pacifists and theater crowds screaming hate at images of Wilhelm II. Winston Churchill takes on a rather brutal hawkish character throughout the entire book. As the story progresses, war gets painted as a near inevitability based on the actions, and even desires, of European and American leaders. Within this context, the air bombings exchanged by England and Germany throughout 1941 take on a shade of ridiculous game playing. As major cities become more and more ravaged, the citizenry's attitudes progress from concerned empathy to rabid vengeance. Baker depicts Churchill as desiring more bombardments to hasten America's entry into the war. The Roosevelt administration is seen as goading Japan into war, which culminated at Pearl Harbor. American pacts with the Chinese, military encirclement, and an oil embargo get cited as examples. Hitler and the Nazis remain monsters. But concerning the holocaust, this book also puts blood on the hands of the English and Americans. In the 1940s, America only accepted a certain amount of Jewish immigration, so the vast amount of refugees had nowhere to go. Late in the book such policies become a part of the slaughter of Jews throughout Europe. Grisly tales of early Nazi killing machines and executions of children and infants increase the grimace factor to breaking point. Ultimately, the book tries to show that none of the war's participants remain blameless for the huge loss of life. It also tries to evoke the questions "did it have to happen?" and "could it have been stopped?" Some "what-ifs" also appear. Did Chamberlain's Munich agreement with Hitler squelch a possible 1938 overthrow plot by German generals? Could the war have ended there?
A question undoubtedly arises as the pages flap by: how "correct" is this interpretation? Has Baker simply selected and arranged events to serve a pacifist agenda? Was World War II all out meaningless and fully preventable slaughter? Such deconstruction remains in the hands of readers and experts. Nonetheless, Baker does cite his sources section by section and page by page in the voluminous "notes" section. As always, some will find the arrangement convincing and others will not. Baker's question in the afterword, "Was it a 'good war?'" remains a worthwhile question regardless, if for no other reason than studies in future prevention. "Human Smoke," with its ominous title and wispy cover art, will get anyone interested in World War II frantically turning pages. By all accounts it remains a great read. Perhaps it even adds a new viewpoint, or adds texture to mainstream accounts. Or perhaps many will discredit it as contrived antiwar propaganda. In either case it will inspire thought and reflection on our race of inexorable killing machines.
A thoroughly unpleasant and deluded book March 13, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The war that nobody wanted but Hitler, that would not have been won without Churchill, that Roosevelt did so much to ensure had many good legacies, is here turned on its head with Churchill as villain, Roosevelt as anti-semite, and the Nazis as misunderstood. Yikes!
Grotesque March 13, 2008
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
"His face is devoid of one single kindly feature. This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition." So says Joseph Goebbels of Winston Churchill, duly reported by Mr. Baker in "Human Smoke." What Goebbels had to say is historically interesting, but Baker presents it as another piece of evidence in his apparent case against Winston Churchill, the clear villain of this book. That anyone would build a moral case or paint a moral picture with the comments of a Goebbels is simply grotesque.
Baker has composed his book largely of newspaper articles and journals. His approach is, it seems, simply to provide us with the evidence undigested and unspun by biased historians, letting us come to our own conclusions about WWII. That's a badly flawed enterprise. One person's opinion of WWII isn't just as good as anyone else's, the facts don't simply speak for themselves, and journalists caught in the events of the time don't always have the clearest view of events. It might have seemed good to some of them in 1941 to make peace with the kind-faced Mr. Hitler (Churchill's moral depravity is clear from his decision to pursue war with Hitler rather than let Europe rest in Nazi peace), but with 60 years of post-war history behind us, can we with a straight face make that claim today?
Mr. Baker's thesis, so far as he presents one, is that WWII was emphatically NOT "the good war." It helped no one and it wasn't necessary. I think he's right to show us that it wasn't a good war. No war is good, and that war cost the world upwards of 60 million lives. The allied fire bombings of Germany were barbaric and of almost no military value - the allies were not entirely good. Recent work has illustrated in horrific detail the impact of fire bombing on Hamburg, for instance, and brought into question the value of the air campaign. If Baker had stopped there I wouldn't give him just one star. But he goes on. Churchill wouldn't have peace, weak China provoked the vicious Japanes invasion by its own aggression, President Roosevelt plotted and worked to get the United States into the war. Even if it were completely true, does that all invalidate the enterprise of ridding the world of the Third Reich? Baker clearly thinks that it does, and that's simply preposterous.
There are few moral absolutes in history. History books are written by winners and survivors, and there's almost no such thing as purely objective history. But there are darker and lighter shades of grey in the picture, here and there swaths of black and white. Perhaps not pure black or pure white, but in contrast with each other the difference is stark. The world is a better place because Hitler's empire isn't in it. Europe is a better place because England refused to let France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands sleep in German peace. Sometimes facts aren't always clear, but the Final Solution was emphatically not just a remedy for housing shortages caused by allied bombing, as Baker's undigested sources suggest.
Baker might have produced something useful, if not entirely original, had he produced a book that showed that not even necessary wars are good, that wars encourage good people to do terrible things, that people who stand on the moral high-ground are often perilously close to the abyss. Instead he's produced something odious, a book that might lead someone not familiar with history to conclude that the difference between Hitler and Churchill was simply one of perspective. His book tries to persuade us that peace is simply the absence of war and that all peace is good. Well, a dead world is a peaceful world. I prefer life.
 A muddled work of Pollyannaish illogic and false equivalency March 12, 2008
78 out of 115 found this review helpful
One might imagine a book about World War II from a truly pacifist perspective which takes as its premise that the Quaker philosophy is correct and that it is better for a person to maintain an ethical commitment to non-violence than to defend one's life and family. Such a book would argue that it would be better for humanity to have allowed Nazi Germany to kill millions more the world over in the hopes that perhaps Hitler would drown in the resulting tidal wave of blood than to raise a weapon and risk becoming that which they fought. Indeed, there are Jewish pacifists who have written exactly to this point, arguing that they would rather have seen their parents and children rendered to ash than to have been forced to lift there hand against another. While one might find this position difficult, a thoughtful reader would be forced to take it seriously and wrestle with its implications. Or one might write a book about those who opposed World War II, examining the basis of their positions and the relative merits of each.
Unfortunately, this is not either of those books and does not provide the ethical challenge of the first or the historical interest of the second.
Instead Baker offers something of a hodgepodge of a book which boils down to three basic points:
1.The Allies were not interested in peace and were, therefore, just as bad as the Nazis;
2.Churchill and Roosevelt were not saints and were, therefore, just as bad as Hitler;
3.The war in the end served no good purpose and aided no one in need of aid.
Each of these of course, is demonstrably false. World War II began, not when Hitler remilitarized, nor when they seized the Sudetenland, nor when they conquered Czechoslovakia, but when jointly with Stalin, Germany invaded, conquered, and divided Poland. Churchill was indeed an imperialist in the 19th Century mode who imagined war as a glorious enterprise, and Roosevelt was an elitist and an anti-Semite. That said, no serious historian offers either man for canonization. Nor does going through the litany of their faults or even their actions which may, or even likely, rise to the level of being arguably criminal mean that their actions put them on a level with Hitler's attempt to wipe out European Jewry and "depopulate" Eastern Europe by setting as an affirmative policy the starvation of millions of Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.
Of course it is the last point, a violent assault on logic if ever there was one which will boil the most blood. One can only imagine the reaction Baker will receive to the Polish edition of "Human Smoke." Or for that matter the feelings of those men and women liberated from Auschwitz and Belsen, many of whom have since died many years later than they would have had Hitler been able to carry through his program of turning them into human smoke.
One might find more room to respect Baker's efforts had he paused and compared the fate of those who opposed the War in the West with those who did the same in Germany. While it is true that Jeanette Rankin suffered much condemnation for her vote against the war, and some opponents in the west were even jailed, this seems mild in the extreme when compared to the fate of Sophie and Hans Scholl and their compatriots in the White Rose
In the end Baker falls for the same trap as did Gandhi when he urged Jews to practice non-violence against the Nazis, imagining that it might require "the immolation of a few hundred or even a few thousand to appease the hunger of dictators." Of course, Gandhi made that statement in 1939; Baker by comparison has the benefit of hindsight to know that the real number was in the millions and that the Nazi's industry of death was not halted because it grew satiated. Did Gandhi ever pause to consider that while he and his compatriots did indeed suffer for India's independence, unlike those who resisted Hitler, neither he, nor Nehru, nor Jinna found themselves tortured and beheaded, nor their families rounded up for mass execution as was the fate of many who resisted in Nazi occupied Europe? Britain quit India when the British people became disgusted by their nation's bloody and costly imperial enterprise, just as one expects the US will eventually quit Iraq when its citizens realize it to be a foolish, violent, and ultimately self destructive endeavor. The people of Nazi Germany had no such option. It is with shock one reads Baker's praise for France's "civilized" decision to stop fighting, without much consideration for the 90,000 French Jews and countless Jewish refugees who the Vichy government dutifully gathered to gift over to their murders.
A thoughtful examination might have likewise considered the result had Britain accepted the Nazi's peace overtures and the US never entered the war. Endless documentary data makes quite clear that Hitler's goal was in fact not to build some 1940 version of the EU but to launch a genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union. Whether this would have resulted in the Nazis controlling much of Eurasia or the Soviets ruling not just Eastern Europe but the West as well one cannot say with any certainty, but can anyone actually say that the world would have been better off for either result?
What we are left with from Baker is a morass of anecdotes, factoids, and relativism, which postulates that Roosevelt's ordering up the drawing of plans for the US to bomb Japan is the moral equivalent of the actual bombing of Pearl Harbor and the anti-Semitism which ran rampant in the United States and Britain is equated with the Nazi's actual execution of genocide. Such absurd positions will no doubt find a hearing in the current environment of an inept imperial president who plunged us into a brutal, unnecessary, and likely ultimately futile war, but they are no more reasonable than those who find a logical equivalence between the sad deaths of civilians killed when a bomb falls from an airplane onto the base of terrorists who choose to reside amidst a civilian population and the victims murdered when a man in explosive vest blows himself in a crowded market or child's birthday party.
Baker's book does hold one strength, albeit a sliver - I know of no other book which details the works of World War II opponents in the West (which is not to say that it does not exist). However this is cool comfort at best. Perhaps some scholar will take up the challenge and deliver a work on this subject that is more thoughtful, sparing readers the need to fill their eyes with human smoke.
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