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Tarfumes.com - Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
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List Price: $30.00
Our Price: $19.80
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5311
EAN: 9781416567844
ISBN: 1416567844
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 2008-03-11
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Editorial Reviews:
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Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy---a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Human Smoke is a chronicle of how the world self-destructed in the inferno of World War II
Comment: Human Smoke is the most unusual book on World War II which I have read. The reason is the format. Award winning American pacifist author Nicholson Baker has told the grisly story by using a Wikepdia approach to his narrative structure. In succinct paragraphs he tells how the world entered the Dantean hell of World War II. A war in which over 50 million people died of battle, bombing, starvation, disease and execution. Baker's
book is perfect for people who have limited time or short attention spans. It is a technique which would do well in textbook histories used in the classroom,
Baker begins his book by looking at prewar Europe, Japan and the United States. He keeps his opinions to himself letting the paragraphs of current events at the time tell their own story. We learn among many other facts that:
a. Great Britain failed in its policy of appeasement towards Hitler.
b. Great Britain was not prepared in a military way to go to war with Germany to aid Poland in September 1939.
c. Winston Churchill was a war hawk who called for war against the Reich. Churchill was no saint! Baker's intensive research reveals him as inimical to the work of Gandhi in India; the advocacy of poison gas against the enemy; the proponent of a blockade against German held Europe despite massive hunger and starvation among innocent women, children and other civilians. The reader will admire Churchill's tenacity and determination to defeat the Axis powers. Churchill was a complex genius!
d. Hitler did not want to conquer the USA. He did want to rule continental Europe with England reigning over the seas and her colonies. Japan was to hold sway in Asia.
e. Charles Lindbergh was an anti-semite and Nordic supremacist who led American First attempts to have the US follow a policy of isolationism.
f. FDR worked behind the scenes to support Great Britain through his Lend-Lease plan.
g. Baker tales the story of Quakers like Rufus Jones and Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick who were opponents of the war. Many went to prison for their refusal to be drafted and participate in a bloody holocaust.
h. Hundreds of voices speak in these short snaps of the historical newsreel. The voices range from the evil cries of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin to Jews trapped in Germany such as Victor Klemperer. Holocaust victims, world leaders, famous writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Zweig all have their say.
The book teaches us that the so called "good war" was an unspeakable tragedy with millions losing their lives. Baker's work will immerse you with the sights,sounds and actions that led the globe from peace down into the murky and bloody pit of total warfare waged with horrific modern weaponry. The book ends in December 1941 as America is sucked into war's maelstrom of death by the attack of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
As one who has read hundreds of books on World War II this is one I highly recommend and will use often in my own research on the war. The title comes from a remark made by Nazi General Franz Halder. As Baker states on page 474 in quoting Halder: :...Halder told an interrogator than when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz late in the war he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell. Human smoke he called it."
Nicholas Baker dedicates his fine book to all the pacifists who were for peace and not war. This reviewer also hopes we all honor their memories by serving the blessed cause of peace. Read and learn!
Customer Rating:
Summary: HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker
Comment: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is Nicholson Baker's history of the lead-up to World War II and the United States' involvement in it. Rather than provide a continuous, blow-by-blow account of things, Baker uses hundreds of brief news items, averaging perhaps half a page in length. These range from 1892 to the end of 1941 (the vast majority of the book deals with the thirties and forties). As Baker recounts a wide assortment of events, he has several questions in mind. As he states in the afterword (p. 473): "Was [World War II] a `good war'? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?" Ultimately, Baker challenges World War II as the exemplar of just war.
Baker's prose is engaging. He quotes whenever possible, and doesn't editorialize much. The brevity of his entries keeps the book moving at a fast pace. Baker draws heavily from newspapers, diaries, memoirs and public statements, and ties each news item to a specific date. This helps keep the material honest.
A lot of what Baker focuses on reveals another side of World War II, one many Americans aren't familiar with. Baker works to show that World War II did quite a lot more harm than it did good. Nevertheless, he at no time sympathizes with the Nazis - he accurately portrays how terrible they could be. Baker explores the warmongering side of Roosevelt and Churchill as well as Hitler. There is a side of the U.S. and Britain that he is keen to show, and some of the things these nations did might amount to shocking revelations for many people. World War II was brought about, to a great degree, by that great confluence of warmongers.
-The United States sold arms to Germany and Japan in the 1930s.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with a great many other Americans and citizens of the world, was blatantly anti-Semitic.
-Before the Holocaust, Germany spent years trying to ship the Jews out. Nobody, including the United States, would take them. While this does not mitigate the horrors the Nazis perpetrated, it is alarming that by and large the rest of the world didn't care what happened to the Jews. Certainly this helped cultivate the environment for the Holocaust.
-The British blockaded continental Europe, and would not allow food shipments through, even food intended for starving citizens of occupied France. Herbert Hoover, the much-reviled, erstwhile president, fought tooth and nail for the food shipments.
-For years, Roosevelt taunted and provoked Japan, hoping to lure them into striking first, so that he could bring the United States into the war without reneging on his campaign promises to keep the country out of war.
-Bombing, a major war strategy for both sides, was notoriously imprecise. An unbelievably small percentage of bombs hit their intended targets. Additionally, both Germany and Britain deliberately, purposely and repeatedly bombed civilian targets.
Human Smoke is recommended to those with an interest in World War II, and to those who believe World War II was a just war, or that it was fought according to the criteria of just war by any nation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: There is no revisionism on the planet that can turn Churchill into Hitler, no matter how eloquently the attempt is made.
Comment: "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization", best-selling author Baker's first work of non-fiction, is a history of the buildup to World War II as told via snippets from newspapers, personal diaries, memoirs, etc. Baker provides a minimum of personal interjections or opinions along the way, preferring instead to let the chosen selections speak for themselves. The end result is a grim and depressing narrative that shows the breaking out of World War II as the inevitable conclusion of the machinations of American industrialists looking for new markets in Asia and Europe, Roosevelt's desires to impose his visions of an Anglo-American order upon the world, and, particularly, Winston Churchill's ruthless and bloodthirsty pursuit of a wider and more devastating war.
It needs to be said by the reviewer and, hopefully, known by the reader that Baker is emphatically not a historian. The text itself and post-release interviews with Baker himself indicate that the author had a thesis in his head before the book was written, and the material presented is that which most strongly supports it. The result is a tale of a haunting descent into both total war and industrial holocaust that, possibly, could have been, if not avoided, at least mitigated, had the men in power simply had the moral fiber to choose differently.
This book is going to appeal strongly to a certain subset of readers that wish to believe that capitalism, anti-semitism, etc., were stronger factors in the outbreak of World War II than, say, fascism and national socialism. The supposed anti-semitism of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt gets almost as much ink as that of the Nazis, particularly as it involves the USA's (along with most every other nation on the planet) unwillingness to take in more Jewish refugees than our immigration laws at the time allowed. Likewise, the push by American aircraft manufacturers to design and sell new warplanes to all and sundry in the 30's, even though the total figures involved come out to about 100 planes total throughout the pre-1939 period, gets more consideration as a cause of the increasing belligerence and actual combat around the globe than does the considerably more gigantic buildup of the fascist and Soviet militaries during the same time.
Likewise, a lot of pages and ink are given over to the pronunciamentos and goals of various pacifist movements through the first decades of the 20th Century, with the clear subtext of "had we listened to them, the war would never have started, or at least not been as vicious". While there is much to be said for studying the pacifist movement prior to and during the start of World War II, there is little to be said for believing for an instant that, had Churchill or Roosevelt just listened more closely to the them, Hitler and Tojo would've somehow been less warlike as a result.
That leads to the biggest problem of the book; it's _incredibly_ biased. All histories are, to some extent, a reflection of the author's biases, sure. However, the lack of any context being provided here would lead the uneducated reader to assume that the viciousness of the war itself and the Holocaust need not have happened as they did. The lack of much editorial context by the author actually serves to reinforce this aspect; the reader has no guide as to why Baker chose a given text in the first place. The reader, if not Baker's argument, would actually be better served if Nicholson had chosen to provide more editorial context for his selections. At least that way, the pro-pacifist, anti-Churchillian bias of the author would be a known quantity instead of something just hinted at.
The obvious counter-argument can be made that, well: these ARE Churchill and Roosevelt's and Chennault's own words, are they not? Sure, they are. However, the context that would clearly show that these men were emphatically NOT the primary actors driving the events of the era is simply not there. We hear much of the bloodthirsty-ness of Churchill, Bomber Harris, etc. The comparable and considerably more voluminous and damning words of the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the era are much less present.
When they are present at all, they've been chosen to show the rare moments when these men were hoping for an end to the war they had started (so long as it ended on their terms and with their bloody conquests already made allowed to be kept).
While a very engrossing and emotionally effective (and affecting) read, I could not recommend "Human Smoke" to anyone whom I was not already aware of possessing a clear understanding of how World War II came to be. While the study of pacifism in the 30's and early 40's has its merits, the conclusion that it would have been effective had just certain men in the West been willing to listen to it, is unsupportable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wow! How easily people swallow revisionism and slander...
Comment: How is it possible that so many people rate this book so high? Do they want to believe in passivism so much that they will accept distortions, errors, and lies from a man who is not a historian? Good grief! Baker used Wikipedia and the NYT as references. Wiki is a great casual reference for ordinary usage, but a book about such a serious topic needs primary sources. The NYT unaccountably under reported the slaughter of Jews throughout the war, yet Baker calls Churchill antisemitic. Even the title of his book "Human Smoke" is based on an error; Baker places imprisoned German Chief of Staff Halder in Auschwitz [where human smoke drifted into his room]. But...Halder was never there. The other distortions and errors would take more time than this books deserves or this space provides.
If you are pacifist who desperately wants to believe that the solution to all wars is to -- simply not fight. Then by all means read this book.
If you are a journalism teacher looking for an excellent example of how errors, half-truths and distortions can be made to sound authoritive. Then by all means read this book.
HOWEVER...if the truth of history, and if ethical writing are important to you, this book is a horrible waste of time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Question
Comment: Reading this book makes me wonder -- can the US really entertain a black president? (I hope so.) We've certainly come a long way re acceptance of Catholics, Jews, women's and black's rights. But we still have a long way to go.
But what struck me after reading the book was, how would history have been changed had we applied the Marshall Plan (or similar) to post WW I Germany? The Marshall Plan has taught us (or should have) how completely our prosperity and well being is linked to the prosperity and well being of others.
What more can you ask of a book than that it make you think?
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