![]() Many are familiar, others are merely boring. Some are actual pieces of Nazi propaganda, though Baker doesn't say so. Several concern Goering, and others Hitler. There are also several about Mahatma Gandhi, a famous pacifist, and Jeannette Rankin, a less-famous pacifist. There are a number of anecdotes that feature what we now call the military-industrial complex. The fact that Churchill drank a great deal features prominently, as does the fact that many American politicians, Roosevelt included, did not want the German Jews to emigrate to the United States in large numbers in the 1930s. ![]() Many of the items concern aspects of history that are well known, and have indeed been catalogued and described many times. Most include, portentously, a date ("It was January 7, 1939"), which at times gives the book the feel of a space-shuttle countdown.īut while the book has a chronological order, it has nothing resembling a narrative. Most feature a person, often famous, always carefully identified ("Hermann Goering, the second in command in the Nazi party"). Each has a source, carefully listed in the back of the book. For Baker's book really is a series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes, composed in the style of the pastiche I have written above. On the contrary, it took me a long time to understand Human Smoke in any sense at all. Usually, things are a bit more complicated.Ĭertainly there was no precise moment of revelation. Still, the process by which I came to understand how Baker came to write Human Smoke was a bit more complicated. Every single fact in the four paragraphs above is correct-correct, at least, in that those are real quotations from real newspapers, and correct in that I really did read about Wikipedia in The New York Review of Books on April Fool's Day. There she discovered an article by one Nicholson Baker-the same novelist who had just published Human Smoke-describing the phenomenon of Wikipedia.Īnd that, of course, is not really what happened. On April 1, 2008-April Fool's Day, as luck would have it-the writer Anne Applebaum was flipping through an old copy of The New York Review of Books. "I'd rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story," she said, "than search through a newspaper to find the story." It was March 27, 2008. ![]() Lauren Wolfe, 25, the president of College Democrats of America, was speaking to The New York Times, explaining how she came to understand the events in the world around her-not from conventional narratives but from clips, news items, and vignettes sent to her by others. The Times's reviewer, the writer Colm Toibin, described the work as "a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism." A couple of weeks later, The New York Times would explain that the book was not a "straightforward narrative as a historian or a polemicist might do," but rather a series of vignettes-mostly 100 words long, 200 max. In a press release, Simon and Schuster announced the publication of Human Smoke, a work of "non-fiction" by the novelist Nicholson Baker: It was March 11, 2008.
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