Human Smoke

by Nicholson Baker

This book is a very engrossing read, detailing the events that led to the Second World War, and encompassing it up to the point of New Year's Eve, 1941.

The book is made up of a series of short descriptions (they aren't even vignettes), sort of like Eduardo Galeano's "Voice of Fire" trilogy. It is rare that a section lasts more than a page. They are arranged in exacting chronological order, and each contains within it at least one quote from a primary source.

The sections concern themselves with the moral, racial, and sometimes logistical concerns of the people orchestrating the war, attempting to stop the war, or simply trying to survive the war. It provides a profoundly human mosaic, and the reader quickly learns a great deal of information that is absent in the usual discourse on the war, to say nothing of it's portrayal in popular media.

This book is particularly damning of the heroes of the war. Churchill is portrayed as bloodthirsty and ignorant, while Roosevelt is shown to harbor a racial outlook not all that dissimilar to Hitler. The thing that shocked me most in reading this was the sheer casualness of peoples' (not simply Germans') Antisemitism, and racism towards the Japanese. It's remarkable to see how far people have come in the last sixty odd years.

Baker, as an author, is almost completely absent from this book, except through his right of exclusion. The writing, largely sourced from the New York Times, contains an impartial feel, reminding me more than anything else of the small articles often seen in newspapers that relate just the classic 5 W's. It is rare that Baker allows irony to bleed into the work, like when American leaders denigrate the Japanese for bombing Manila, Baker reminds us that two years later, Americans flattened the city.

In the afterward to the book, Baker allows his own voice to creep in for the first time, when he dedicates the book to pacifists who "tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and sto the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."

This book stands as a moving testament to what Baker calls on the cover "The end of civilization". It is a portrayal of warfare that, were it more common, might serve as a greater deterrent to generations with no real recollection of these events.