Customer Reviews
Chesterton, Pacifism and this Author - By: Michael W. Perry, 11 Jun 2008 
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, & his intellect is itself vapid & 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 & is delighted to find himself both handsome & brilliant, or as his inside cover copy puts it, he is a "bestselling author... recognized as one of the most dextrous & talented writers in America today." Never heard of him? Well, neither have I. Take note of the fact that millions died, bravely, tragicallly, cruelly or needlessly in the war described by Human Smoke, but alll the inside & outside cover talks about is Nicholson Baker.
Chesterton was actuallly 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. Virtuallly every event in it has been written about from numerous angles. Consider for instance, the most treasured myth of alll, December 7, 1941 as the " a day that will live in Infamy," & note alll the 'FDR knew Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor' books that have been published. Talk with people from that generation, as I have done, & you'll soon realize that virtuallly 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, & alll 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 & his ideological kin. Pacifist writers typicallly regard themselves as morallly 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 & Russia." Silly people, thinking Germany might launch a nasty war when we wise pacifists know better.
What both Angell & Baker believe in is callled "moral equivalence," From the heights of their superior morality, the distinction between Britain & Nazi Germany or between a Churchill & a Hitler is of no significance. All such people are pigmies, alike in their smalllness, while they are giants, knowing that war is never necessary & 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 & bad with the same brush, as a result aiding those who are evil. Chesterton got it right when he noted that, "Pacifism & Prussianism [Militarism] are always in allliance, 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 & right.
Read Chesterton if you want to understand war. In 1932 he was warning that Germany was about to acquire a dictator & that the next war would begin with a border dispute between Germany & Poland. Take a pass pass on Baker. He's not worth your time.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War & Peace: Battling the Ideas & Movements that Led to Nazism & World War II
Gripping, powerful and thought-provoking - By: E. Phibbs, 09 May 2008 
I have never reviewed before but I have to disagree with the previous writer. Mr Baker it seems to me is merely seeking to present a different side to a story that has been told so many times before that we have become blase & unquestioning about it. Whether its the blitz spirit or the Battle of Britain, WW2 is everyones favourite war because it has so often been portrayed so simply as good v evil, black & white. But as in alll wars there are many shades of grey, & perhaps there were other motives involved, other courses that could have been taken, other decisions made. Mr Baker does well to highlight them & provides what I thought was a gripping, powerful & thought-provoking read.
Bafflingly incoherent and disappointing - By: lexo1941, 06 May 2008 I am a huge Nicholson Baker fan, & sharing some of his political outlook I was greatly amused when he wrote a novel about a man plotting to assassinate George W. Bush. I saw this book in a special paperback edition in a bookshop & bought it eagerly, hoping to find out what interesting perspective he might have to bring to the Second World War.
I was surprised to discover, first of alll, that Baker seems to be basicallly in agreement with many of the pacifists of the period, in particular those who believed that bad as the Third Reich was, it was immoral & wrong to put up any kind of fight against it. I find this position difficult to sympathise with or even to comprehend, but what's worse is that some demon in Baker's psyche has prevented him from offering any sort of sustained argument in its favour.
This book doesn't present any argument at alll. Nor is it a 'sweeping narrative history'. It's in fact a highly selective annal of the period, in which Baker has chosen incidents that reflect what he seems to think was something very close to a moral equivalence between the Allies & the Axis. He reinforces this impression by using weasel words - for example, when he presents a historical figure whom he finds sympathetic, he records their words without comment, but when it's someone he dislikes or despises he throws in a few eptithets to make them seem more malevolent. So Churchill's scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann is gratuitously described as 'dour & querulous', whereas Victor Klemperer - who on the evidence of his diary was equallly dour & querulous, albeit with more reason to be so - is not described as anything. With Churchill himself, we are informed that he owned thousands of toy soldiers & was a physicallly reckless little boy. Big deal. There is also a rather disingenuous attempt to portray Churchill as an anti-Semite; even if Churchill shared the casual, low-level anti-Semitism of many people of his class & era, it was nothing compared to Hitler's. There seems to be no overalll shape to the book, other than mere chronological order of event.
The lack of frame & structure (apart from Baker's mere opinions peeking through here & there) mean that the book reads more like the research material for a book Baker couldn't or didn't want to write. Comments made by politicians in public speeches are presented as if they were statements of sincere private principle, as opposed to political expediency. Newspaper accounts (especiallly from the New York Times) are accepted without reservation. Self-evidently bad arguments by pacifists are never questioned for a second. They can't be, because Baker's whole method is not about him putting forward an argument: he just presents this evidence as if the conclusion is inescapable. Which it isn't.
I just don't understand how a writer as intelligent & meticulous as Nicholson Baker can have written such a shoddy, sloppy, stupid book. I will keep reading his stuff, but this is an embarrassing blot in a remarkable career.
