Human smoke
by Nicholson Baker · first published 2008
16mentions
10recommended by
12HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
77% recommend8% neutral15% critical
Why HN recommends it
A collage of newspaper headlines, news reports and real-time accounts from the years before WWII, offering a revisionist view of the war's origins and the choices of all sides, for readers wanting another view.
Common criticism: Critics say it leans on selective sources and reads as provocative rather than balanced history.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Don't miss Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, far and away the best introduction to a cynical interpretation of WWII.
on “The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989)” ↗Suggested reading https://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Beginnings-World-Civiliza...
on “The U.S. Navy Almost Fought the Soviets Over Bangladesh” ↗…theories, etc, and only the official narrative will be regarded as valid, because that's how history goes. Since you recommended me a book, I recommend you this book in return https://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Beginnings-World-Civiliza...
on “To do politics or not do politics? Tech startups are divided” ↗If you like this kind of thing, you will enjoy Pat Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War" and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke http://books.google.com/books?id=PYESsQRyIIMC&printsec=f... http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&printsec=f...
on “SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar” ↗A helpful book in understanding the real Winston Churchill is Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke"
ww2 was more like that than you think. Check out Nicholson Baker's "HUMAN SMOKE"
on “The ties between Silicon Valley and the military run deep” ↗In a similar vein, I recommend the 2008 book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker. He summarizes news reports and other real-time accounts from the years leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. An excerpt,…
on “I'm reading the FT and WSJ from 100 years ago each week leading to 1929” ↗Related to the supposed inevitability of war AND nazi Germany, I recommend Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s a good catalog of the choices, both economic and philosophical, on all sides, leading up to it (and contrasted with pacifists).
on “What does Palantir actually do?” ↗Human Smoke is brilliant. I had no idea that Roosevelt was a virulent anti-semite [1] or that starvation through blockade was a key part of allied strategy.[2] And TIL that between 500 000 and 3 000 000 Germans…
on “The Real War 1939-1945, by Paul Fussell (1989)” ↗Human Smoke http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&printsec=f... Churchill, Hitler, and "the unnecessary war": how Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world http://books.google.com/books?id=PYESsQRyIIMC&printsec=f...…
on “Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?” ↗I highly recommend Human Smoke by Nicholas Baker (2008) for a book that puts WWII in a historical perspective different from the one we inherited.
on “Stanford launches Archive of the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945-46” ↗I suspect you’re right. The Mezzanine and Human Smoke were two of my most impactful reading experiences. Mutually, totally orthogonal and yet both speak to the unbelievable cardinality of complexity in real life
on “Ways of Seeing: Nicholson Baker learns to draw” ↗…directly to them. This went on well into the late 1930s. It was recognized as a potential problem by some but the profits were large enough that these were ignored. I encourage everyone to read the book "Human Smoke." It is a collection of headlines and newspaper excerpts from the period surrounding WW2. It's a fascinating read and wonderfully exposes all the propaganda driven half truths and complete fabrications…
on “300k airplanes in five years” ↗…World War 2 perhaps it wouldn't be the first book to recommend or even number 10. Given the exhaustive pop culture coverage in movies along with endless documentaries and books one would assume reading Human Smoke in context would not leave a reader believing that Hitler was desperately trying to avoid war.
on “The U.S. Navy Almost Fought the Soviets Over Bangladesh” ↗…documents that suggest that the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom were provoking Germany and Japan into war and had ulterior motives for participating." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke The reviews are less than stellar: "Historian Noel Malcolm described it as a "strangely childish book"[3] and journalist William Grimes in The New York Times as a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral…
on “Stanford launches Archive of the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945-46” ↗