Chesterton, Pacifism and this Author - Rated 
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
Gripping, powerful and thought-provoking - Rated 
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 and 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 and white. But as in all wars there are many shades of grey, and perhaps there were other motives involved, other courses that could have been taken, other decisions made. Mr Baker does well to highlight them and provides what I thought was a gripping, powerful and thought-provoking read.
Bafflingly incoherent and disappointing - Rated
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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