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| Author: Nicholson Baker
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $17.25
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New (43) Used (11) from $17.15
Avg. Customer Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 2486
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: First edition hardcover with dustjacket. New.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Bad War June 21, 2008
6 out of 15 found this review helpful
World War II was bad. Very bad. The worst. Baker is hung up on this idea, so much so that among other things he's blind to the difference between vicious aggression and desperate defense.
Roosevelt was something of an antisemite, but far less so than, for example, Henry Ford and Rupert Brooke. And that guy Hitler. Stalin was a mass murderer, but his country was attacked by its erstwhile "ally," that guy Hitler. Churchill was a bully, but Hitler and the Japanese militarists, including the Emperor who refused to rein them in by merely shaking his head, considerably outclassed him in that regard. More innocent people were killed by the Japanese at Nanjing than by the American atom bombs, which, whatever their moral implications, were designed to *end* the war that Tokyo began. "Human Smoke" wants you to ignore these facts and many, many others. Why is not clear. Baker's method is that of the late Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not!!, just as entertaining and just as shallow.
Another note: as has been proved again and again in World War II and later, bombing rail lines is rarely cost effective. With plenty of slave labor available, Germany would have rebuilt those lines to Auschwitz in no time. Pilots and planes undoubtedly would have been lost on every return mission.
World War II was not the "end of human civilization." It was a sample. It showed that bad dudes can now end civilization for real if they really want to.
 Mr. Baker has drawn back the curtain, again. June 15, 2008
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
The loud political noise has hidden the historical evidence for generations, now it is revealed. Thank you, Mr. Baker, for the saddening lessons of doublespeak, doubtless enduring yet still. It takes me weeks to read so much history, I need to process the glimpses before adding to the growing knowledge. It is worth the effort to learn this truth.
Chesterton on Baker and Pacifism June 11, 2008
15 out of 29 found this review helpful
G. K. Chesterton aptly described authors who write books such as this one, noting: "He is cold, he is caddish, he is an intellectual bully, and his intellect is itself vapid and thin. He is marked by an imaginative insufficiency which can be compared to nothing except to finding a Commander, in the thick of battle, looking into a pocket-mirror instead of a field-glass."
Asked to look at the bloodiest war in human history, Nicholas Baker consults his pocket-mirror and is delighted to find himself both handsome and brilliant, or as his inside cover copy puts it, he is a "bestselling author... recognized as one of the most dextrous and talented writers in America today." Never heard of him? Well, neither have I. Take note of the fact that millions died, bravely, tragically, cruelly or needlessly in the war described by Human Smoke, but all the inside and outside cover talks about is Nicholson Baker.
Chesterton was actually describing an earlier pacifist author, Norman Angell, but his description holds true for Baker. His intellect is vapid. He does seem to think he's boldly demolishing "treasured myths" about WWII. He hasn't read much. Virtually every event in it has been written about from numerous angles. Consider for instance, the most treasured myth of all, December 7, 1941 as the " a day that will live in Infamy," and note all the 'FDR knew Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor' books that have been published. Talk with people from that generation, as I have done, and you'll soon realize that virtually no myth about the war lacks a counter-myth. In short, Baker's book is a lazy book, one built on press gossip from the war years, some of it true, some of it dubious, and all of passed through a vain little mind with an axe to grind. I prefer to get my history from historians.
I should talk about his axe. There's been a lot of unnecessary emotional reaction to this book because people react to Baker's surface arguments without realizing the core attitude that drives writers such as Baker and his ideological kin. Pacifist writers typically regard themselves as morally superior to people such as Churchill or FDR. Noman Angell displayed that attitude in 1933, after Hitler took power in Germany, when he proudly claimed in a book: "No one pretends now--as the papers quoted above used to pretend--that war was due to the special wickedness of Germans, the sudden swoop of the satanic wolf in a peaceful work lusting to each such harmless lambs as France and Russia." Silly people, thinking Germany might launch a nasty war when we wise pacifists know better.
What both Angell and Baker believe in is called "moral equivalence," From the heights of their superior morality, the distinction between Britain and Nazi Germany or between a Churchill and a Hitler is of no significance. All such people are pigmies, alike in their smallness, while they are giants, knowing that war is never necessary and always bad. That's one reason why this book upsets people who still have a healthy moral perspective.
The result is history. Unable to tell good from evil, pacifists smear the good and bad with the same brush, as a result aiding those who are evil. Chesterton got it right when he noted that, "Pacifism and Prussianism [Militarism] are always in alliance, by a fatal logic far beyond an conscious conspiracy." Both would have might triumph over right, that is if after reading them you can even tell the difference between might and right.
Read Chesterton if you want to understand war. In 1932 he was warning that Germany was about to acquire a dictator and that the next war would begin with a border dispute between Germany and Poland. Take a pass pass on Baker. He's not worth your time.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
HITLER WAS JUST A TRIGGERMAN June 3, 2008
1 out of 14 found this review helpful
THIS RIVITING ACCOUNT OF WHAT LED UP TO W.W.II TELLS ME MOST OF THE CIVIIZED WORLD WANTED TO RID THEMSELVES OF THE "JEWISH PROBLEM". THEY JUST NEEDED SOMEONE TO DO IT, AND THEY FOUND THE MONSTER WHO COULD CARRY IT OFF- HITLER. THE WHOLE WORLD IS TO BLAME FOR THE SLAUGHTER OF 6 MILLION, INCLUDING 2 MILLION CHILDREN.
The Suppression of Reason June 3, 2008
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
Clarence Pickett, Rufus Jones, and other American and British pacifists tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and prevent the war to end all wars. They shamed Hitler into allowing them to take thousands of Jews out of Germany. They fought Churchill's empty-headed insistence that feeding French children was tantamount to supplying German soldiers with guns and bombs. They met with Roosevelt again and again and again. His childlike love of naval battle and a desire for the glory of war made him indifferent to their pleas.
Millions died.
Baker's careful documentation of the road to war and the resulting suppression of reason proves that mistakes of the past will be repeated unless we choose to change ourselves.
A powerful book.
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