Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nicholson BakerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-11
ISBN: 1416567844
Number of pages: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
Book Review: Bafflingly incoherent and disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
I am a huge Nicholson Baker fan, and 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 and 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 all, that Baker seems to be basically 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 and 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 all. 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 and 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 and querulous', whereas Victor Klemperer - who on the evidence of his diary was equally dour and 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 and was a physically 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 and era, it was nothing compared to Hitler's. There seems to be no overall shape to the book, other than mere chronological order of event.
The lack of frame and structure (apart from Baker's mere opinions peeking through here and 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 (especially 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 and 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.
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