Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Nicholson Baker can no longer be called a miniaturist, said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. The 51-year-old writer, who made his name with novels about such mundane topics as a man buying shoelaces and a baby consuming a single bottle of milk, has now written a book that questions everything Americans have been taught about World War II. “If you believe that the Second World War was a good and just war, then a lot of things follow from that,” Baker says. Baker questions just how good a war it was. He had been troubled since childhood by the mass bombings of civilians that were carried out by Allied forces, and in Human Smoke he explores how the conflict came to that. His conclusion: Pacifism wasn’t an adequate answer to the Nazi threat, but warmongering on the part of Churchill and Roosevelt made the outcomes worse.

Human Smoke has an unusual structure, said Jeanné McCartin in the Portsmouth, Maine, Herald. Retracing nearly a half-century of buildup to the war, it’s mostly a series of short vignettes about the major players, rather than an extended, explicit argument. “I wanted the reader to live through the war like readers of the time,” Baker says. “A lot of history is hiding in plain sight in the New York Herald-Tribune and Chicago Tribune.” Though his narrative may suggest that the war America did fight wasn’t necessary, Baker shows little appetite for battling any readers who might be offended. “I don’t mean to offer any final truth,” he says. “I did want to raise questions.”