The Anthologist: A Novel

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Description

Paul Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming verse, but he’s having a hard time getting started. The result of his fitful struggles is The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s brilliantly funny and exquisite love story about poetry.

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A New York Times Notable Book, 2009

Favorite Fiction of 2009–Los Angeles Times

Best Books of 2009–The Christian Science Monitor

Best of 2009–Slate.com

"A Year’s Reading" Favorites, 2009–The New Yorker

 Best Books of 2009–Seattle Times

 

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Customer Reviews

A fictional yet realistic portrayal of "writer's block" without ever using the term
Paul Chowder is a poet who has compiled a new anthology of verse called "Only Rhyme." Now that he's gone through the tedium of choosing only the very best and most applicable poems to his premise, he must finish the job by writing the book's introduction. Except that he doesn't. He mostly ruminates to us about the history of poetry and poetic form. He rails against the popular use of iambic pentameter. And he finds other tasks that need to be done instead. Much to the chagrin of his girlfriend and the consternation of his editor.

That might sound to some as being the thinnest of threads for a plot, but I assure you that it works. Any poet or writer who reads this book will find plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. We've walked the same path that Paul has walked; and from this distance, we can find humor (and ourselves) in it. "The Anthologist" might be fiction, but it reads like a memoir that's both funny and true. And Paul's insights about the REAL number of beats in a line present some food for thought. Bravo, Mr. Baker.

This is my first encounter with Nicholson Baker's work, and it won't be my last. After reading his pregnant prose, I feel as though I should go back and re-read "Trout Fishing in America" by Richard Brautigan or even "In His Own Write" by John Lennon. And maybe I'll do just that. But not before I read a few more of Baker's novels. He is truly a wordsmith who captures a reader's attention. At the very least, he's now attracted mine.

Oh, and anyone who feels that he/she needs a refresher course on poetry while reading "The Anthologist" would do well to pick up "The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within" by Stephen Fry. It's too bad that Paul Chowder is a fictitious character. It would have been interesting to have been able to lock him in a room with Stephen Fry and Paul Muldoon. A cage match for poets? What fun!

2010-08-28 (Athol, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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the anthologidt
This book is for everyone who has ever scanned a poem.The central theme of the novel is the fascination, love, and respect for poesy, the craft of making poetry, of Nicholson's protagonist, a published minor poet, Paul Chowder, Events fall into place about this theme. We are given Chowders, and I'm sure Nicholsons, thoughtful examination of the poets tools, meter and the out of fashion, rhyme and comments and evaluations of poets, pat and present. The novel stimulates thinking about poetry in a way that no textbook could.

2010-08-22 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.
"You can start anywhere," as narrator Paul Chowder says in this delightful little book. (He was talking about writing poetry, or mowing the lawn.) So I'll just start right here, and write a little bit about some of the things that I really liked about this novel.

Firstly, I like Paul Chowder himself. His semi-stream of consciousness monologue about poems and plums (poems that don't rhyme - like the ones Paul writes), his feelings of ambivalence about modern poetry and the poetry culture, his sadness and hurt over the loss of Roz, his live-in girlfriend for the past nine years, and his ironic, self-effacing and (what seems genuinely) honest views of himself. He's not self-absorbed, as one reviewer I read suggested; he's just alone and lonely and fumbling around, trying to plan his next move at an emotional crossroads.

He's about my age (early 50's), I guess, and a somewhat successful poet (three published collections, past winner of a Guggenheim), but nevertheless struggling financially. He can't teach to sustain himself, because teaching makes him a professional liar - telling all those young students that their attempts at poetry are worth reading is simply lying. But he has a lot to teach, and he does so charmingly from start to finish as he rehearses in his mind the themes of the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming poems he has compiled called "Only Rhyme". He starts by saying he's going to tell us everything he knows about poetry, and though I doubt that he really does accomplish that, he does tell us a lot.

He tells us of his admiration for the great rhyming poets, and about his disillusionment when his fourth-grade teacher encourages the class to write in free verse: "It doesn't have to rhyme!" He tells us that the controversy over the importance of rhyming in poetry goes back 500 years. He acknowledges that free verse has given many more people the freedom to try their hand at poetry (natural rhymers are rare) and that his own career started with that schoolteacher - his own poems don't rhyme, they're plums. He tells us his strongly held views on meter: the natural English language meter is the four-beat line, the ballad stanza, root of great poetry and pop music. He declaims against the lauded status of the (imported from French) iambic pentameter: it's not five beats to a line he insists, it's six when you include the all important end-of-line rest; the rhythm is really a three-beat count, not six beats, like a waltz; the word iamb is itself not iambic. ("The real rhythm of poetry is a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, a waltz.") As if to emphasize the importance of rhythm, Paul is always setting famous verse to his own tunes. He warns of the dangers of "enjambment", especially in its "ultra-extreme" form. And he tells us countless anecdotes and bits of gossip about the whole population of nineteenth and twentieth century poets.

I like the fact that through it all, Paul takes the reader on quite an entertaining and informative tour and reviews his thoughts on poets and poetry, on rhyme and meter, thoroughly enough to allow him at long last to spill out his anthology introduction in a whirlwind three days - but instead of the targeted forty pages, the introduction weighs in at two hundred thirty-nine (four pages short of the length of this book!). It will need some cutting, but this book doesn't - I like all two hundred and forty-three pages.

It's not clear how much of what Paul Chowder tells us reflects Baker's own views - Paul is the narrator of a novel after all. But his nostalgia for rhyming poetry (he "always secretly want[s] it to rhyme" when he comes across a new poem in a magazine, journal or anthology, "don't you?"), sensible as it seems to philistine me, is a bit too heretical: even when lamenting the unfashionableness of rhyming, he takes careful pains to acknowledge the greatness of modern poetry and many (non-rhyming) modern poets, even Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom he deplores.

Paul starts by saying that "poetry is prose in slow motion". He notes that in poetry there is no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. And he avers "poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing." True, true and true. And by these standards, this wonderful book should be thought of prose-poetry. How's this for slow motion prose:

"Another inchworm fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices - full of the short happiness of being alive."

As mentioned, it is always unclear whether the views on poetry that Paul expresses are "nonfiction" in the sense of revealing the author's own views. And the narrative is nothing if not a controlled sob over Paul's career to-date, his poetry, his future ("Poetry is a young man's job."), and his loss of Roz. Eventually, the sobs burst out as Paul delivers a master class at the "Global Word Congress" (a conclave of "masses" of poets) in Switzerland. He even ironically throws in a bit of iambic pentameter in the first line of a chapter following the one in which he presents his unorthodox disquisition on the classic meter: "A freakish mist lies over the land. [rest]"

And like a poem, this novel demands to be read a second time - which I did immediately, for a better understanding and for the pleasure.

There's not much narrative tension here, not much in the way of building action, climax, resolution and denouement. "Oh plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself." But as Paul packs up his collection of books (anthologies) and pines for his lost Roz (whose breasts, like poetry, "don't have to rhyme, but [...] do."), he draws the reader into sympathy with his situation, with his reflections on the past and present of poetry, and (for me at least) with his optimism about its rhyming future:

"And I'm sure there will be a genuine adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulets will flow. And everyone will understand that new things were possible all along."

There's a lot to like here, and it makes me want to know more of Baker's work. But before I do that, there are a lot of poets and a lot of poetry I need to catch up with.


Paul McMahon
July 2010

2010-07-24 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A Poet's Novel
I loved this book. It spoke to basically every insecurity I have as a poet. This book is about Paul Chowder, a poet who is suffering from a manic case of writer's block. In this novel, we spend a pretty good amount of time in Chowder's head as he discusses his reasons for not writing, his failing relationship with his girlfriend, and the craft of poetry. Nicholson Baker creates an intelligent character who is flawed, sad, and at times, pretty funny. Paul Chowder is at all times interesting. I highly recommend this book, especially if you're a poet.The Anthologist: A Novel

2010-07-01 | poetkat (Marina del Rey, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Musings on poetry
It's probably never happpened before that I read a book so UNplot-driven. I found this book listed among the best of 2009 by the The New York Times, Amazon, and one other notable list that escapes me at the moment. So I checked it out of the library. I became intrigued with the voice of the narrator, Paul Chowder, so I kept reading. I think maybe this book is a bit too long, even at 240 pages. About half-way through, I began to get antsy. I started skimming through the long passages about iambic pentameter, Theodore Roethke and Sara Teasdale. Wanting to find out how things turned out with Paul's former girlfriend, Roz, I finished the book. I did learn that Ezra Pound was a fascist, at least according to Paul Chowder, which I did not know, despite being an English major in college.

2010-05-07 (renton) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Description

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 Smoke delivers 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 within Human Smoke that 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.

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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 Smoke delivers 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 within Human Smoke that 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.

Questions for Nicholson Baker

Amazon.com: This is obviously a big departure for you, in both style and subject. How did the project come about, and how did it find this form?

Baker: I was writing a different book, on a smaller historical subject, when I stopped and asked: Do I understand World War Two? And of course I didn't. Also I'd been reading newspapers from the thirties and forties, and I knew that there were startling things in them.

In earlier books, I've looked closely at moments to see why they matter, and I've tried to rescue things, people, ideas from overfamiliarity. So in a way a book like this--which moves a loupe over some incidents along the way to a much-chronicled war--was a natural topic.

But yes, the style is a departure: it's very simple here out of respect for the hellishness of the story that I'm trying to assemble, piece by piece.

Amazon.com: Why World War Two in particular?

Baker: Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end of civilization.

But then we also say that because it turned out so badly, it was the one just, necessary war. We acknowledge that it was the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity--and yet it was "the good war." The Greatest Generation fought it, and a generation of people was wiped out.

If we don't try to understand this one war better--understand it not in the sense of coming up with elaborate mechanistic theories of causation, but understand it in the humbler sense of feeling our way through its enormity--then cartoon versions of what happened will continue to distort debates about the merits of all future wars.

Amazon.com: You largely kept your own opinions out of the text, except for the choices you made in what to include and a few editorial comments here and there, as well as your short Afterword at the end. It makes for a real tension between the neutral tone and the sense, at least on the part of this reader, that there are some passionate opinions behind it. What authorial role did you want to establish?

Baker: I found that my own cries of grief, amazement, or outrage--or of admiration at some quiet heroism--took away from the chaos of individual decisions that move events forward.

It helps sometimes to look at an action--compassionate, murderous, confessional, obfuscatory--out of context: as something that somebody did one day. The one-day-ness of history is often lost in traditional histories, because paragraphs and sections are organized by theme: attack, counterattack, argument, counterargument. That's a reasonable way to proceed, but I rejected it here for several reasons. First, because it fails to convey the hugeness and confusion of the time as it was experienced by people who lived through it. And, second, because I wanted the reader to have to form, and then jettison, and then re-form, explanations and mini-narratives along the way--as I did, and as did a newspaper reader in, say, New York City in September, 1941.

I think the pared-down, episodic style allowed me to offer some moments of truth that I wouldn't have been able to offer had I had uppermost in my mind the necessity of making transitions and smoothing out inconsistencies and sounding like me. I offer no organized argument: I want above all to fill the readers mind with an anguished sense of what happened.

Amazon.com: I was telling someone about your book and how it failed to convince me of what I took to be its thesis, and his response was, "Wow, you really made me want to read it." And that's my response too: if your point was to convince me that we shouldn't have fought World War II, then the book didn't work, but I'm still very glad I read it. But maybe that wasn't your point at all.

Baker: I'm really pleased that you responded that way. I didn't want to convince, but only to add enriching complication. Long ago I wrote an essay called "Changes of Mind" in which I tried to talk about how gradual and complicated a shift of conviction can be. I left overt opinionizing out of this book so that a reader can draw his or her own conclusions, folding in other knowledge.

There are many books about the war that I value highly even though I don't agree with the world-outlook of the people who wrote them. To take a major example: Churchill's own memoir-history is completely fascinating and revealing--and a great pleasure to read--although I happen to think that Churchill was himself a bad war leader.

There's no point in trying to use a book to replace one simple set of beliefs about World War Two with another simple set of beliefs. The war years are alive with contradictions and puzzles and shake-your-head-in-wonder moments. You're going to look at it in different ways on different days because you're going to have different moments uppermost in your mind.

On the other hand, I don't want to hide what I think. Here's what I am, more or less: I'm a non-religious pacifist who is sympathetic to Quaker notions of nonviolent resistance and of refuge and aid for those who need help. I find appealing what Christopher Isherwood called "the plain moral stand against killing." I don't expect people to look at things this way, necessarily--after all, it took me a while to get there myself. But I do hope that my book will offer some thought-provocations that anyone, of any ideological persuasion, will want to mull over.

Amazon.com: It's hard to believe there's something new to say about what may be the most written-about event in human history. What did you feel about approaching such a well-chronicled subject? What were you most surprised to find? What responses have you gotten from historians and other readers?

Baker: There were many surprises. For instance, I didn't expect Herbert Hoover, who argued for the lifting of the British blockade in order to get food to Jews in Polish ghettoes and French concentration camps, to be a voice of reason and compassion. I didn't know that German propagandists used the phrase "iron curtain" before Churchill did. I didn't know that in 1940 the Royal Air Force tried to set fire to the forests of Germany. I didn't know how interested the United States government was in arming China. I didn't know how public was Japan's unhappiness with the American oil embargo. I didn't know that many of the people who worked hardest to help Jews escape Hitler were pacifists, not interventionists.

I've had interesting reactions from historians, who seem to understand (for the most part) that I'm not trying to write a comprehensive history of the beginnings of the war. I've had some very good reviews and some very bad ones. The bad ones seem to follow the teeter-totter school: that if a dictator and the nation he controls is evil, then the leader of the nation who opposes the evil dictator must be good. Life isn't that way, of course. There is in fact no "moral equivalence" created by examining coterminous violent and repulsive acts. The notion of moral equivalence is a mistake, because it undermines our notions of personal responsibility and law. Each act of killing is its own act, not something to be heaped like produce on a balancing scale. One person, as Roosevelt said, must not be punished for the deed of another--though he didn't follow his own precept.

Gandhi comes up sometimes. It was said in a review that I "adore" Gandhi. That's not quite right. Gandhi is in many ways an admirable and perceptive man. He spoke gently even while thousands of his supporters were in jail and his country was being bombed by an occupying power. But the years told on him, and he sometimes came to sound, as Nehru once observed in a memoir, cold--indifferent to suffering. He is one voice, and a voice worth listening to.

My real heroes, though, are people like Victor Klemperer, who responded to Hitlerian terror not with counterviolence, but with beautiful nonresistance: by writing a masterpiece of a diary. He and Romanian diarist Mihael Sebastian have the last word for that reason. And I've dedicated the book to British and American pacifists--I want this book to rescue the memory of their loving, troubled efforts to help.

The most interesting and helpful set of responses to the book so far has been at www.edrants.com, where a group of participants discussed Human Smoke for a week, adding all kinds of thoughts, analogies, comparisons, and criticisms. I've never been through anything like it before, and I'm the better for it.

Amazon.com: Your recent celebration of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books has gotten a lot of attention (deservedly so). Did the style and philosophy of Wikipedia influence the way you wrote Human Smoke? Have you made any Wikipedia updates based on what you found in your research.

Baker: I used Wikipedia during the writing of the book, especially to check facts about subtypes of airplanes and ships--e.g., the Bristol Beaufighter I cited in the first paragraph of the review. Wikipedia is amazingly strong and precise on military hardware. (And on when a British Lord became a Viscount, and on a million other things.) But I've been writing movies, and the model I often had in my mind while working on Human Smoke was the movie documentary--in which short scenes and clips follow each other with a minimum of narration.

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Customer Reviews

Succeeds in revealing hypocrisy of UK/US while at the same time squandering all credibility
When "Human Smoke" first came out I vigorously defended the intent of the author and the content of the book. The author, Nicholson Baker, used simple quotes and news stories to show how FDR and Churchill sacrificed their moral credibility with their multitude of hypocritical actions.

Except, there is a fly in the ointment. No, it's not just a fly. It's a tarantula. Baker's overall argument goes far beyond western hypocrisy. He's arguing against the very concept of fighting a war against someone as clearly evil as Hitler. When I first started the book I thought the critics were exaggerating this part of Baker's argument. Surely this was just a side issue and his primary focus was on UK/US hypocrisy? But no, I was absolutely wrong.

On page 122 Baker quotes Gandhi as saying that he could "conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators . . . Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime." It was at this point that I was reminded of Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" in which the protagonist realizes he's been duped by the government to fight in a war and that he sacrificed his sight and limbs for nothing other than propaganda. That's exactly what Baker is advocating in this book - that people should have blindly marched to their deaths as pacifists just as the government would conversely have soldiers blindly march into battle. Baker is no better than those he criticizes.

Baker ends the book with a dedication to the pacifists of WWII who "failed, but they were right."

If Baker had just stuck to highlighting UK/US hypocrisy he would have have had a potential literary non-fiction masterpiece. Instead, we are left with propaganda that mimics the propaganda it opposes.

2010-08-31 (New England) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Strange selection of disjointed quotes
It is possible to obtain an impression of the points the author is trying to make, but the first third of the book is a disjointed selection of quotes. It is not possible, without repeated reference back to earlier quotes, to obtain any coherent view of any one person's agenda during this pre-war period. It is as though the author reviewed his research notes and just cut and paste a few quotes together. The result is not so much a coherent whole as a print of his research. Undoubtedly he worked hard, but this is not "writing".

2010-08-30 (Illinois) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Clearing the Smoke from Our Heroes
I've just read Nicholson Baker's take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been fought, and that Churchill and Roosevelt were as bad as Hitler. This leads to a pretty much categorical dismissal of the entire work. Here's a bit from the New York Times review:



As "the reader" in this instance, I at no time felt "forced" to draw any such conclusion, nor any other proffered by this and other similar criticisms. If I felt that the book's central message was so naively simplistic, I would likewise dismiss it.

What the book does do is to remind us that the events of World War II were not black and white, that Churchill and Roosevelt were not utterly pure and heroic in their motives or executions, and that there was a legitimate anti-war sentiment that pulsated at the time-one that was as well-intended and as based in honest principle as any opponent of, say, the Iraq invasion in 2003 (putting aside whether the opponents of battling Hitler were in that sentiment correct, which I think history bares out that they were not). The principled pacifists of that era deserve to have their story told, stories seldom told-how many World War II histories can you think of that feature Gandhi as a central figure and moral voice?

The book also reminds us, very often through primary sources such as diaries and direct quotes, how removed those waging war can be from those suffering unspeakably from its horrors. The prime ministers, presidents, ambassadors and generals often seem heartless and utterly out of touch in regards to the real world consequences of the war's mass butchery of human beings.

Yes, Baker shows us the often-bloodthirsty and callous sides of Churchill and Roosevelt, but this aspect of such a giant figures needs to be aired, needs to be remembered. It is important that we are reminded that throughout history the good guys are not always good-a lesson which, to this reader, only made the bad guys seem even worse. As jaw-dropping as some of the Allies' actions and sentiments were, the acts of the Nazi regime as recounted by Baker were so horrific, so awful, so monstrous, that Churchill at his worst never approaches the evil of Hitler.

Baker makes that very distinction clear without having to say it explicitly. Baker gives us the real human beings as they were in this chapter of the human story, and does not need to explain that, yes, of course, Hitler was far worse than any Allied leader. Perhaps some folks, still oversensitive and over-reverent of certain persons and eras, just need it spelled out more plainly, and have the same versions of history fed to them on slightly different spoons each time.

2010-08-23 (Washington, DC) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A fascinating exercise in truthtelling
To put it mildly, in Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker has produced an amazing book. It was one of the most absorbing 400+ page books I have ever read.

The book is made up of hundreds, probably close to 1,000, short vignettes that trace the events leading up to World War II and its prosecution until the end of 1941 (which, for the U.S., marked our country's entry into the War).

These vignettes are mostly simple, descriptive statements; only rarely is Baker's voice apparent. An example of an editorial comment, though, may be found on page 452: A December 10, 1941, Gallup poll had shown that two-thirds of the American population would support the U.S. firebombing Japanese cities in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. "Ten percent--representing twelve million citizens--were wholly opposed. Twelve million people still held to Franklin Roosevelt's basic principle of civilization: that no man should be punished for the deeds of another. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one of them."

As should be obvious (and reviewers have all taken pains to note), the reader should not mistake the objective tone of Baker's reportage for a merely descriptive intent on his part. Baker clearly has an agenda--though precisely what that agenda is remains for us to discern from the book's contents. It has no introduction or commentary beyond a very brief "Afterword." However, by what he includes and excludes, Baker tells a story filtered through his own lenses and reflecting his own concerns.

The final paragraph of the afterword is telling: "I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right." (474)

These two quotes I have cited do, I think, give us a sense of what Baker is up to. Though he is far from a Nazi apologist (some of his vignettes about Nazi actions evoke visceral outrage), Baker makes clear that opposition to Nazism in itself did not settle the question of what the best response to their actions would be.

The response of British and American leaders horrify Baker. He makes it clear that neither country did even come close to what could have been done to save Jewish and other refugees nor to provide aid to starving children and others in Europe (he has a number of telling quotes from former President Herbert Hoover who was deeply frustrated in his efforts to take aid to needy people in Europe). That is, to allude to Baker's subtitle, he presents this war as anything but a war to save civilization and support humane values.

Baker uncovers a voice, a perspective, a record of action that is completely ignored in most discussions of World War II. He makes a strong case for acknowledging two crucial points. (1) There were pacifists, such as Quaker leaders Clarence Pickett and Rufus Jones, who faced head on the unspeakable evils and sought to bring healing to the brokenness. Theirs was far from an ethic of withdrawal, passivity, or parasitism. (2) And, the responses of the leaders of the "Free World" only compounded the evils set loose by the Nazis and Japanese militarists.

This is what I especially drew from the book: When faced with extraordinary crimes against humanity, the defenders of Western civilization with little resistance succumbed to the same criminal spirit. We learn just how bloodthirsty Winston Churchill and other British war leaders were--insisting on horrific violence against German civilians in face of clear evidence that such violence was ineffective, even counter-productive. Churchill had the asinine belief that if the British starved and traumatized the German people enough, they would rebel. Of course, the opposite happened--the Allied actions only strengthened the Nazis hold on the people's loyalty (which, of course is precisely what happened in Britain in face of German air strikes). This reality is clear already by the end of 1941--Baker's book stops long before Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

By taking Pickett and similar pacifists seriously, Baker shows that there were alternative approaches. This is not to say that he is even hinting that "Hitler could have been stopped" by the pacifists (he makes this clear with a number of somewhat jarring quotes from Gandhi that convey a pretty strong sense of naiveté). I think his point would be rather that simply responding to evil with evil not only is profoundly immoral and destructive of the core values that the Nazis' opponents sought to defend, it also does not work very well. Surely a more humane and moral approach by the Allies to resisting the Nazis would have saved untold lives on all sides and greatly heightened possibilities of internal resistance to Nazi governance.

The enormous challenge humanity faces if it is to have a future is how we might, to quote Walter Wink, "oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves" (the opening words to his wonderful book Engaging the Powers).

The issue that arises from the book for me is its challenge to the easy (and extraordinarily corrupting) assumptions that World War II in some sense was a "good war" that in some sense successfully defended the core values of western humanism. In fact, it seems clear that the true winner of the War was the spirit of violence. A good book for confirming this point for the United States is James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

2010-07-20 (Harrisonburg, VA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A powerful and disturbing book
I'm a boomer and the son of a European immigrant, a woman who spent part of her teen years in a Nazi slave labor camp and who then became a displaced person after WWII. So, WWII history has always been more personal to me than for many of my peers. I majored in history in college and was jolted awake when I was introduced to the discipline of historiography, the study of history itself. You've heard it said that "history is written by the victors" and this is quite true. Reading "Human Smoke" brought this lesson home once again.

One of the enduring myths of WWII is that the Nazis had some monopoly on cruelty and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Hitler and Co. were a nasty bunch and they did perpetrate horrible atrocities. I know. My mother endured many of them. But as my mother pointed out to me when I was a youngster, no army was perfect and all soldiers have the potential to be cruel. What is so startling in Baker's book is to read how the prejudices of many of our own leaders (e.g. Roosevelt) as well as our allies' leaders (e.g. Churchill) grew to embrace the wanton slaughter of civilians as an acceptable and moral manner of the conduct of war. In the same manner that many Americans took exception to the Bush administration's policies regarding the treatment of detainees, so did many Germans take exception to Hitler's treatment of the Jews. And yet both Churchill and Roosevelt regarded the actions of Hitler as being the express and uniform will of the German people and this, in their minds, justified the use of terror in the conduct of war.

But though Americans now tend to look back at our involvement in WWII as in some ways a set of actions to save the world from the Nazis and Japanese, in fact, as Baker reports, the Roosevelt administration was not anxious or even sympathetic to the plight of European Jewry. It blocked the attempts of Jews to enter this country and turned away boatloads of refugees. Why? As Baker illustrates, a pernicious anti-Semitism pervaded Roosevelt's administration (and no, I'm not Jewish).

Worse, Baker reports on how our participation in a blockade of food to Europe accelerated a famine that swept the continent, years before the horrors of 1946 when people such as my mother ate bark to survive. And, Baker tells of our country's rush to develop chemical and biological weapons to use against both the Germans and Japanese . . . long before we entered the war. And to read how the British and American bomber commands reveled at the destruction they could wreak on civilians with incendiary weapons is sickening. And all of this was rationalized as being a legitimate tool to shape the behavior of dictatorial regimes. To wit: "if we (the Allies) wreak enough destruction of your civilian population and cities, you (the Axis leaders) will change course." Utter nonsense.

Baker has produced a powerful work. Did he selectively report some facts while omitting others? Like any historian, he had to pick and choose. But what he has done is recover and report some facts that have long been hidden in the shadows of powerful myths and in so doing, has given us reason to pause and think: is this how we should fight our wars?

2010-04-06 (Washington D.C.) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Mezzanine

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780802144904
• Demand: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Courage, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and rite to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

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Customer Reviews

A bravura performance for the first half of the ride . . .
. . . but after that it becomes bumpy and herky-jerky and threatens to stall out altogether, so that I was glad when I finally made it to the mezzanine and the end of the book.

THE MEZZANINE has no plot. Instead, the first person narrator, Howie, notices and meditates on all sorts of commonplace minutia of the life of an office-worker, circa 1985. His account is centered around an escalator ride in the lobby of an office building up to the mezzanine, where he works for a large company. This particular escalator ride took place as Howie returned to the office from his lunch break, during which, among other things, he bought new shoelaces to replace the pair whose second lace broke during the morning (the first lace having broken only two days earlier, the coincidence triggering all sorts of detailed and convoluted theories about shoe lace wear and tear).

Howie is something of a doofus. Even as an adult, he occasionally entertains himself by trying to retie his shoes "without seeming rushed" as he rides up an escalator; he regularly brushes his tongue as well as his teeth; while standing at the urinal in a men's room, he often is so cowed by others standing next to him that he can't release his stream; and he is addicted to earplugs, wearing them most of the day and night, even when sleeping with his girlfriend.

Many of his observations and ruminations involve changes in the "technology" and design of everyday objects and apparatus - for example, straws (paper vs. plastic), interior lighting (incandescent vs. fluorescent), paper towel dispensers vs. hot-air blowers, door knobs, and vending machines. His other principal subjects are minor social conventions (such as the "two ideal ways to wind up a light conversation with a co-worker") and the microscopic deconstruction of everyday actions (such as tying shoelaces).

In truth, THE MEZZANINE is much more interesting than the above probably makes it sound. Also it frequently is funny, at times quite funny. Nicholson Baker is uncommonly percipient, he has a very fertile and creative mind, and he writes well. And there are footnotes! Lots of footnotes, some quite lengthy, including one extended footnote on footnotes. (Baker once said in an interview that THE MEZZANINE "was an attempt to stop time by expanding the length of the paragraph by using the footnote as a kind of fermata.")

This is the fourth of Baker's books that I have read, but it was his first published novel. For perhaps the first half of the book, I was entranced. It was a bravura performance, and I was gravitating towards the opinion that Baker's first published work surely had to be (like the first album of some singer/songwriters) his very best. But my enthusiasm did not last for the entire escalator ride. The conceit begins to wear; Baker begins to indulge himself in showing off; he occasionally becomes catty and irksome; and he also has his overly gross moments (for example, imaginary urination in the faces of men standing near him at men's room urinals and real-life boyhood urination into sanitary napkins swiped from his mother's closet). The novel is novel and accomplished (especially for a first novel), but it also is moderately flawed.

2010-04-26 (Santa Fe, NM) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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details
If your into details of your surroundings and things that happen around you, this book is for you. Laughing out loud, alot! Excellent.

2010-02-10 (Wisconsin) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A torturous failure in experimental fiction
It's really painful for me to read the fawning praise by other Amazon reviewers lionizing this book for its originality. The entire work could serve as a cliché for artistic pretentiousness at its worst, an exercise in trivial and transparently post-modern intellectual narcissism. Often when you hear an artist's work described as `experimental', it's code for `original but not very good.' This book effectively epitomizes the notion of experimentalism gone awry. Since there is basically no story, we are left with the writing - unremarkable at best - and the ideas, which basically catalogue frivolous lines of thought in which the narrator marvels at the breaking of his shoelaces two days apart, the evolution from milk delivery to cartons, the pleasures of refilling a stapler, and other nonsense. In effect, the author thought it would be clever to hit the reader over the head for 150 pages with life's absurdity. How could this be entertaining? I wondered too and made the mistake of finding out.

I read another reviewer, doubtless agitated by some reference to the book's vapidity, declare that people focus too much on the big questions, when it is really the minutiae that make the difference in our quality of life. I disagree. The reason people differentiate between minutiae and the important is precisely because one is far more relevant to our existence than the other. Maybe there is some nihilistic wisdom in cultivating a jubilant reaction to menial tasks and minor feats of engineering, giving exaggerated meaning and joy to people whose lives are otherwise ordinary and mediocre in every facet, but it's boring as hell to read about.

2008-06-09 (Ottawa) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 1

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Seinfeld on Crack
Imagine describing 3 minutes of minutaie for an entire book. That's Mezzanine. One of my favorites though. A real brain screw.

2008-04-17 (Trumbull, CT) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Unreadable
I enjoyed baker's previous books, VOX and Fermata, but found this book to be completely unreadable and boring.

2008-04-06 | meilichios (Houston, Texas United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Description

The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.

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Novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker has had a small but well-deserved cult following since his first book, The Mezzanine, and the publication of the literary sex-bomb Vox saw his popularity mushroom. Baker's great gift is a precision of observational detail that has a peculiarly incisive effect on a reader's consciousness. Here is over a decade's worth of his essays and articles, including the much-praised card catalogue article first published in the New Yorker. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny and thought-provoking book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of our time.

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Customer Reviews

This Lumber Room Is Filled With Insights
I am re-reading this collection and I am reminded of just how much Baker has to offer readers. The essay "Books as Furniture" is a masterpiece of whimsy, sociology, tangent hunting, and joy in observations that lead to adventures for the mind.

2009-06-30 (Narberth, PA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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IT'S NOT WHAT BUT HOW HE SAYS WHAT HE SAYS . . .
Based on reading just half this book I scrambled back to Amazon and ordered everything else he's written. (Then I went back and finished the rest of SIZE OF THOUGHTS; the brilliance never dimmed. Baker's amazing agility with words never stopped surprising and tickling.)

Those other books are coming in now, and I've skimmed three or four and they are no-less unique amazements. MEZZANINE, as an example, immortalizes some guy's thoughts on a 135-page escalator ride. All, an inner monologue of comments and perceptions that made me feel I'd slipped into an alternate universe that exceeds description by anyone by Baker. (Consider a format where there's as much copy in the footnotes as in the narration.)

Nicholson Baker can see and describe anything and make it readable, interesting and insightful. Wish I could write like that.

2008-03-12 | rclarknv (Edge of Toiyabe Nat'l Forest, NV) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Absolute Rubbish
I've read and enjoyed other works by Baker (The Fermata, Vox), but this collection of magazine articles is absolute rubbish. Random musings on arcane topics such as fingernail clippers, cinema projectors and model airplanes not only fail to entertain, they appear to have no redeeming value whatsoever.

Baker is without question a talented writer, but this collection aptly demonstrates that even the best author needs adequate subject matter with which to work. I'm stunned at just how bad this collection actually is. The first time I've ever awarded a one star rating.

2007-01-28 (Arkansas) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 1

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Lumber!
This is a brilliant book. It consists of several short essays on varied subjects; fingernail clippers, a review of a slang dictionary, and the demise of card catalogues to name a few, and one long essay on the history and usage of the word 'lumber'.

Nicholson is a master of finding the sublime in the mundane and his essays bring into focus the understated beauty of everyday objects. Eccentric and and at times almost comically over-erudite? Sure, but you'll find yourself nodding in silent recognition at his apt descriptions of the minutiae of daily life.

2006-04-18 | book lover (Kobe, Japan) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Puny Thoughts
The world is full of whiners, and this guy is the king. As a pup, Nicholson Baker attended the School Without Walls where, "learning has no limit." Unfortunately for us, the only message he got resulted in his permanent low self-image.

If you purchase ANY of this poor misbegotten soul's books, you are doing nothing more than feeding the mouth of a permanent pessimist.

Nicholson, we're praying for you and your children.

2004-06-30 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 1

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A Box of Matches

Description

Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.

What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no further than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

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One man's simple, colloquial meditations on his past, his family, and his life's daily minutia are the substance of Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches. Feeling that life is passing him by, Emmett, a middle-aged medical textbook editor, decides to wake up early each day to sit by a fire in his country house and record his thoughts in a diary. "Good morning," Emmett begins, "it's January and its 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here in the dark." From this vantage point, Emmett reflects stream-of-consciousness style on whatever occurs to him, no matter how mundane: his recent trip to Home Depot, how he met his wife, the habits of the family duck. Routines, such as how he makes his morning coffee in the dark or picks up his underwear with his toes, are described with childlike reverence and directness. All told, nothing much happens in A Box of Matches, which seems to be the point. Baker is more interested in the idea that for many, life is made up of such apparent trivialities, and that only by pausing to appreciate them can anyone gain any lasting satisfaction. Baker emphasizes this through the moments of understated wisdom and joy that Emmett derives from ordinary occurrences, such as the daylight through the window: "a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so." This is the philosophical equivalent of a one-joke premise, however, and there are moments when Emmett's naiveté and laundry list-like narrative wear thin. Likely understanding this, Baker has wisely kept things short. A curious, often charming novel, A Box of Matches will inspire some readers, while inspiring frustration in others. --Ross Doll

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Customer Reviews

Book of Matches
This was a fabulous and funny book. The author is without a peer in his style and wit.3 cheers for this gem of a book.

2009-12-01 | Shel (Carlsbad, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Excellent!
Everything was smooth and perfect! Condition is excellent, just like new, but about 99% off a regular price! Couldn't have asked for anything better! Shipping was very expedient and it only has a library lamination, and property sticker, but it keeps the book in better condition. I would recommend the seller to everyone!

2009-01-24 | bargain shopper (Chatham, NY USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Good, but I wanted more
This is the first Baker novel I read, and I'm almost lost for a review. The book is an extremely fast read - I got through it in 2 days on my Kindle. The story draws you into Emmett's life, but I'm not so sure this is a good thing. Actually, the novel reminded me of my solo journey's through Europe where I drink wine, write down random thoughts in my journal, and then sum them up to my friends and family via email. They find them to be good reads and recommend I publish, but then enough say what the heck was that about? This is a unique read and recommended for that.

2008-07-20 | kindle advocate (Chicago) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Writing down everything you see and think...
Fictional story centered around Emmett, a 44-year old Father and medical textbook editor. He gets up before dawn each morning, lights a fire and shares his reflections on lighting the fire, making coffee and other trivial and mundane thoughts that are sprinkled with some deeper reflections on himself, his family and his life.

I was moved by a number of flashing-by passages relating to his children, his parents and his own ruminations on mortality:

"Last night I washed my son's hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose your composure."

However, these passages were overwhelmed by a large number of thoughts such as this one:

"The mug of coffee rests on top of the ashcan, and it gets hot on the side that it near the fire. But it stays cool on the side that I sip from. This particular mug has a blue stripe around it and a small chip in the sipping area."

I found the story verbose and overwritten with detail (and maybe that was the point in getting us to appreciate the wonder of this world. Yet I found that I had to wade too hard and too long in the inconsequential and minutia to get to the too few nuggets of pure reflection. I found this novel challenging to finish and it wasn't for me.

2008-05-31 (CT, USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Hardly a page-turner, but read it for the sheer joy of reading
This is one of those books where nothing really happens, but that's not really a bad thing! It is the story of a man who get up every morning very early, while it's still dark, to light the fire with a box of matches.

The narrative takes us through the motions of each of these mornings, and the subsequent day, through his thoughts, and via a series of flashbacks, over some of the events of his life.

Will it keep you on the edge of your seat? No. Is it worth reading for sheer skill of the storytelling? I think so

2007-04-06 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Description

The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.

With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.

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Customer Reviews

Interesting but often unreasonable
Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a fiery polemic dedicated to the task of protecting what he sees as one of our nation's most important resources: our libraries' massive stockpile of seldom-used older books and newspapers. As Baker explains, the extent of our paper reserves of old newspapers and rarely read old books is dwindling, often being chopped up and "preserved" (that is, their content, rather than their form, is preserved) in either microform or a digital format.

Baker's position is not a nuanced one; we need to save everything. To do this, libraries need to purchase warehouses, warehouses basically without end, so that not a Sun-Times or musty tome is thrown aside. The very first sentence in the summary on the back cover reads "The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word" which shows Baker may have a basic confusion between the definition of a library and the definition of a repository, but never mind: the point is, Baker says, a library neglects its duties when it throws away disused materials.

Baker's writing style is eloquent and engaging; however, the entire book is dominated by a one-sided and hostile tone, along with his distinctly uncharitable characterization of his opponents.

I think the basic philosophical difficulty in Baker's position can be found in the chapter with the title "A Swifter Conflagration." Here, Baker fully reveals his philosophical position that all pieces of written media are valuable as individual objects. It is not merely enough that a rarely-used book's contents are preserved somewhere; merely disposing of a particular object is itself always a dereliction of duty.

Baker says:
"The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas [i.e. textual content]. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, [Baker's ally] believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the conditions of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense..."

This is a rather overstated thesis. Some books and newspapers are valuable essentially for their own sake, rare books such as the Gutenberg Bibles, for example. However, it doesn't follow that every library must preserve every non-duplicate book or newspaper on its shelves, some of which, such as pulp novels, are almost certainly disposable once their shelf-life is over. What Baker calls for is for libraries to devote large portions of their physical holdings to items that, not virtually, but literally, do not circulate.

Clearly, there are some documents for which preserving the content, as opposed to the object, is enough. Sometimes a microform copy may be enough. But in any case, a non-print version of some kind will be enough for a large number of items, such as research and journal articles is certainly enough.

There are times in Double Fold when Baker seems to be using the sheer confidence of his vituperation to slip some questionable logic past the reader. At one point Baker complains that the Library of Congress threw out ten million dollars worth of public property. However, his criterion for this figure is replacement value. This is a somewhat meaningless, almost sneaky figure. A lot of otherwise worthless things might be rather pricey to replace. Being difficult to replace does not make something valuable in the first place.

This is not say there are not some worthwhile themes in Double Fold. Baker's complaints about microform are well taken, his call for a national repository even more so. While I may disagree that individual libraries are responsible for every physical document they've ever possessed, it would be nice for historians if they could expect to find them somewhere.

Baker also provides the reader with an entertaining and occasionally fascinating history of book "preservation," including the disastrous use of large, book-filled, black-goo spurting tanks of explosive gas, formerly owned by NASA. Another memorable anecdote involves the creation of paper from the wrappings of Egyptians mummies.

The fact that Baker's book is quite biased and sometimes infuriating should not dissuade an intelligent reader from giving it a shot; however, some practical knowledge of libraries and a questioning attitude are prescribed.

2007-06-01 (Pittsburgh, PA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Librarians or vandals?
Well, pretty clearly vandals. Let me give another example or two of how right Baker is. I've been doing some historical research on various topics in 19th and early 20th century New Hampshire and Vermont history. Newspapers of the time are full of relevant information. Alas, actual copies of the newspapers I need no longer exist. Specifically, the Hanover (NH) Gazette, Burlignton (VT) Free Press, etc. All have been destroyed and now exist only on microfilm, much of which is simply unreadable. It would be one thing if librarians had microfilm copies of newspapers produced AND kept the originals so that those of us who needed to consult the originals could do so. But they didn't. They tossed the originals and these no longer exist. If this isn't vandalism, I don't know what is.

2007-05-13 (Chappaqua, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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I See No Conspiracy
I don't doubt the author's word that there are isolated examples of libraries discarding old papers but I dont see any Orwellian conspiracy.
As a graduate student in Library Science and Information Studies, I would much rather manage e-books simply because paper is a big hassle. I also get tired of seeing trees cut down for untouched books.
Furthermore, managing information technology as opposed to baby sitting books has more appeal to employers and provides more cover for higher salaries.
Schools of Library Science/Information Studies can attract better students and more students to degree programs that provide skills as opposed to esoteric book studies.
However, there is no conspiracy against paper. To the contrary, the State University of Iowa offers graduate classes dealing purly with book studies.

2006-05-28 (Tampa, Fl. USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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An eye opener for the realists
Would suggest this be listed in the Hall of Fame.

2005-08-18 (Toronto) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Hilarious and ridiculous
...to even think of blaming libraries. Maybe if high powered political figures on library boards across America didn't feel the need to make their served institutions "All Things to All People" and got back to core values, and if the American public could turn off American Idol and reality TV long enough to end the Reign of the Retard, there would be the support for libraries needed to house all the items ever published anywhere, and every Podunktown can have it's own Library of Congress. Guess you've truly made it when you've sold enough books you can bite a hand that feeds you, Mr. Baker.

However that does not detract from the quality of his writing, stellar as usual.

2004-07-02 | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 1

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