Pacifist aggressive: Nicholson Baker's odd take on World War II.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization - Book review

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

By Nicholson Baker

Simon & Schuster, 576 pp.

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In Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, Nicholson Baker explains the world's long, terrible spiral into the cataclysm that was the Second World War. It is a pointillist's history of the march to war, drawing on a vast number of speeches, memoirs, diaries, newspaper and magazine articles, and other primary sources--much of it material from pacifists, protesters, and relief workers that is overlooked by traditional histories. Each of the book's 475 pages contains a vignette or two that captures an attitude, a feeling, an opinion, a decision, or an event that was expressed or took place between 1914 and the end of 1941. Skeptical of historians--"Sometimes I think historians are a little like saute chefs," the author told the New York Times a week before the book's publication. "They cook everything up and soften the edges"--Baker inserts space between his hard-edged vignettes in a way that heightens their poignancy, and that seems to let them tell their own story, without filtration, one that is "truer and sadder and stranger than the received version," as he put it in the Times. Of course, using spaces to replace context merely invites the reader to infer a context from the masterfully manipulated vignettes. Unfortunately, in creating a history using material that has been often omitted, he has given us a history fatally frill of omissions itself. And in an effort to insist on a different view of the war, Baker has produced a book perversely ignorant of what everyone seems to know.

In Human Smoke--the title comes from a phrase used by one of Hitler's generals to describe the atmosphere at Auschwitz--Baker hopes to elucidate a pacifistic interpretation of events, one that argues that both sides were supporters of inhumane policies and authors of terror and destruction.

To do this, Baker employs a moral relativism that is as astonishing as it is infuriating. Perhaps if one aims to produce a truer, sadder, stranger history of one of the most chronicled episodes in human history, it is natural and even necessary to demythologize the heroes of the conventional narratives. Baker attempts this with artful acts of character assassination. For example, in one of the first thirty of his thumbnail sketches, Baker offers us Eleanor Roosevelt in 1918 snidely reporting on a party for...