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.
"Absolutely fascinating, engrossing. I can't imagine anyone, no matter how knowledgeable about the period, who won't be astonished and moved while reading Human Smoke."
--Daniel Ellsberg, author of
Secrets: 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 of
The Man Who Loved China and The Professor and the Madman