Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker

This is a deeply controversial book. World War II is ordinarily described as the Just War, the one war that trumps any pacifist arguments or philosophy. How could we have met the threat of dangerous warmongers like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito without resorting to overwhelming force? But like all history, the standard version is interlarded with myth, and Baker goes back to primary sources to construct an alternate view. Human Smoke is essentially a pacifist history of World War II, and the heroes of that war—Churchill especially, but also FDR--do not come out with their halos intact. Only Gandhi and other pacifist figures such as Clarence Pickett come out with their halos freshly burnished, and as I was reading I imagined them blinking in the sunlight of unaccustomed popularity.

Nicholson Baker is known primarily as a meticulous, detail-obsessed novelist (Mezzanine and Vox are his best known books), and Human Smoke started out as a novel. But Baker realized that he couldn't write a novel about WWII unless he understood it, and he was mystified by the material that he was gathering; and so he decided, temporarily, to become a historian. He assembled a collage of episodes and quotations, in chronological order, to construct a narrative of the road to war, with special attention given to the 1930s.

Baker is very rarely present in his own book. He lets the episodes speak for themselves. In form, Human Smoke is reminiscent of Sven Lindqvist’s History of Bombing (which is now unfortunately out of print): a story emerges from the arrangement of episodes. The book begins with Alfred Nobel's prediction, in 1892, that advances in military technology might put an end to war itself, and ends on December 31, 1941, when most of the people who would die in World War II were still alive. Guest stars include W.H. Auden, Mussolini's son-in-law, Charles Lindbergh, Lord Halifax, Goebbels, Aldous Huxley--literally a cast of thousands.

The book has met both with critical acclaim (Mark Kurlansky in the LA Times) and critical scorn (William Grimes in the NY Times). There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of middle ground. Why not have a look at the book and decide for yourself? It's a staff pick at the front of the store.

While reading Human Smoke, a small nagging fear or premonition afflicted me, that 70 years hence, a book of this sort might be written about the decade we are living through now, just as this book was written about the 1930s. What avoidable catastrophe are we blundering towards today? What future ironist will indict us? And will we deserve the indictment?