Human smoke by nicholson baker - Essay Example

The book ends in 1941. The aim of this paper is to produce a summary of the book that records a timeline in the world history for about fifty years. Human Smoke talks about almost every country that was involved in wars of the early twentieth century in one way or the other. The book also talked about the stories of people that played active roles in the two world wars. From the likes of Winston Churchill, a well-known figure to the likes of Jeanette Rankin (Montana legislator), whose impact in the US declaration of war against Germany in the First World War seem to have been forgotten.

Human Smoke explained that Jeannette Rankin was the only legislator in the United States House of Representative that voted against the participation of the US forces in the First World War and she was also the only legislator that voted against the Second World War. The book also discussed the roles played by people like Theodore Kaufman and Henry Emerson Fosdick during the war. Kaufman was a ticket seller at Brooklyn that wrote a tract on the purification of Germany, while Fosdick was an advocate for war that later turned to be an advocate for peace (pacifist) (Baker).

Baker tried to work on the intellect of the readers by presenting readers with data, thus causing them to draw inferences from these data. Baker is not explicit in the presentation of his argument and the implication of this is that readers would have to draw conclusions from some of his implicit statements. Baker actually gave an outstanding account of the events of these world wars in a way that it has not been given before by any historian and this is actually what distinguishes the book from other works.

The unique thing about the book is that it is more like a dedication to the British and American pacifists that stood against the war. Baker explains that these pacifists tried to restore peace to the world by resolving the differences between Japan and the United States of America. They also tried to