Due diligence: I have not read this book. I'm actually taking standard industry practice and commenting on a work based on the comments made by someone who (might have) read it.
From VSL:
Baker questions the necessity of WWII (and all wars) by portraying the key good guys in a viciously harsh light — in his depiction, Winston Churchill wasn’t a grand heroic figure at all, and he and FDR were the original bring-it-on cowboys, who forced needless suffering on millions of European civilians. A Gandhian pacifism, Baker suggests, would have been the correct response to the Third Reich.
Beyond its profoundly revisionist central arguments, Human Smoke pioneers a fresh mode of serious nonfiction: It consists of hundreds of freestanding information nuggets arranged in strictly chronological order, chosen carefully (and tendentiously) to make his argument...
I dunno. I'm not a smart man, but I reckon that if I looked hard enough I could find enough slices of history to justify anything.
However, I'm torn because I don't know if Human Smoke is more or less distorted than the average history; at least it's 'honestly' slanted in the same sense that 'honest' politicians, when bought, stay bought.
No comments:
Post a Comment