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Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker |
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JEWS_PERSECUTIONS JEWS_EUROPE WORLD WAR, 1939-1945_CAUSES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Description/Notes |
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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.Human Smokedelivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative withinHuman Smokethat unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand. 'Absolutely fascinating, engrossing. I can't imagine anyone, no matter how knowledgeable about the period, who won't be astonished and moved while readingHuman Smoke.' -- Daniel Ellsberg, author ofSecrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers 'This quite extraordinary book -- impossible to put down, impossible to forget -- may be the most compelling argument for peace ever assembled. Nicholson Baker displays in astonishing, fascinating detail mankind's unstoppable descent into the madness of war -- slowed only occasionally, but then invariably most movingly, by the still, small voices of the sane and the wise.' -- Simon Winchester, author ofThe Man Who Loved ChinaandThe Professor and the Madman 'InHuman Smoke, Nicholson Baker turns his unrivaled literary talents to pacifism. His portraits of Churchill's imperial arrogance, Franklin Roosevelt's anti-Semitism, the machinations of the arms merchants, the Germans' death wish, and the efforts of pacifists are unforgettable. Baker's book is truly original.' -- Chalmers Johnson, president and cofounder of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author ofNemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic 'Nicholson Baker movingly pierces the lies, hopes, fears, and myths we so easily imbibe on the road to war -- painful reminders that what has happened in the past can happen again and again and again until we shake loose and react.' -- Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland, and author ofThe Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Alfred Nobel, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author ofLay Down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World's Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.'Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,' Alfred Nobel said. 'On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.'Stefan Zweig, a young writer from Vienna, sat in the audience at a movie theater in Tours, France, watching a newsreel. It was spring 1914.An image of Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar. 'Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted,' Zweig wrote. 'The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant.'Zweig was frightened. 'It had only been a second, but one that showed me how easily people anywhere could be aroused in a time of a crisis, despite all attempts at understanding.'Winston Churchill, England's first lord of the admiralty, instituted a naval blockade of Germany. 'The British blockade,' Churchill later wrote, 'treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population -- men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound -- into submission.' It was 1914.Stefan Zweig was at the eastern front, gathering Russian war proclamations for the Austrian archives. It was the spring of 1915.Zweig boarded a freight car on a hospital train. 'One crude stretcher stood next to the other,' he wrote, 'and all were occupied by moaning, sweating, deathly pale men, who were gasping for breath in the thick atmosphere of excrement and iodoform.' There were several dead among the living. The doctor, in despair, asked Zweig to get water. He had no morphine and no clean bandages, and they were still twenty hours from Budapest.When Zweig got back to Vienna, he began a pacifist play,Jeremiah. 'I had recognized,' Zweig wrote, 'the foe I was to fight -- false heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the 'word makers of war' as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem.'Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, voted against declaring war on Germany. It was April 6, 1917.'I leaned over the gallery rail and watched her,' said her friend Harriet Laidlaw, of the Woman Suffrage Party. 'She was undergoing the most terrible strain.' Almost all of her fellow suffrage leaders, including Laidlaw, wanted her to vote yes.There was a silence when her name was called. 'I want to stand by my country,' Rankin said. 'But I cannot vote for war. I vote no.' Fifty other members of the House voted no with her; 374 voted yes. 'I felt,' she said later, 'that the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war she should say it.'One of her home-state papers, the Helena Independent, called her 'a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl.'A young pro-war preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote a short book, published by the Young Men's Christian Association.War was not gallantry and parades anymore, Reverend Fosdick said. 'War is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds; it is shooting by telephonic orders, at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men.' War, he said, is 'men with jaws gone, eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone.'Fosdick ended his book with a call for enlis From bestselling author Baker comes a highly researched and surprising new book about the decades preceding World War II. 'Human Smoke' is a superbly assembled narrative that encompasses the vast political, social, religious, and economic landscapes throughout the world. |
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