Continuing with the books this week. Looking through the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that these book things take a lot of scrolling to get through. The blog software has a limit on how long an article lead can be, and I topped that on Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly. The way around that is to split the piece in half, putting the extra into the "extended body" -- don't know if there's a limit there, too. But it occurs to me that from here on out it might be best to just put the top section into the blog entry and drop the quotes section into the extended body. Means you'll have to do an extra click to get there, but it'll be easier to get around when you're just scanning.

The books pieces are all kept in the Books section, although they're not guaranteed to be up to date when I make the initial post. I generally update the whole website once a week, usually on Monday, so that's when we all get back in sync.

Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008, Simon & Schuster)

Baker's book is written as a chronological compendium of short news bits, as informal as a tabloid newspaper. The story begins before 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany -- the nominal starting date of WWII. It begins before 1933, when Hitler seized power in Germany. The early parts could have been documented more fully, but they give us a taste of the nations and persons squaring away for the big war. The story goes on through the end of 1941, by which time Germany has invaded the Soviet Union, and Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor and overrun the American colonial territory in the Philippines. It's also a date by which Germany had started implementing its "final solution" and the US had launched its Manhattan Project, another concept of final solution. It's worth pointing out that Churchill always saw massive bombing as the way to beat his enemies, but believed that bombing would only increase the resolve of the English to fight on. It's worth noting that while Roosevelt waited for the US to be attacked before entering WWII, he planned assiduously for that day, and for several years pushed policies to provoke Japan into attacking the US. It's also worth noting that whereas today we see the Holocaust as a convincing reason for the US and the UK to have gone to war against Germany, at the time neither Churchill nor Roosevelt would show Jewish suffering the slightest recognition or credence: in public and in private they entered the war for other reasons. It's also worth noting that the only people who did try to help Jews escape from impending doom were the pacifists, who in the end were too few and too late.

The following quotes offer a taste of this remarkable book.