More than that, I followed JAIME’s advice and went to my library. I’m 5th in the reserve line! In the absence of this blog I might have encountered an interesting new twist in high demand. Hmmmm.

I know, I know …. populism vs historical balance … always a tough one.

There’s always the local library – that’s how I intend to read it. Of course, time is as at much of a premium as $$ for me.

(BTW – love the blog)

I love raw primary materials — use them all the time in teaching and writing — but selection itself is a form of argument, distortion.

Of course it is, but who is saying otherwise? I don’t see that Baker has anywhere claimed to have written history as it really was. The opposite, in fact, judging by the Amazon interview I linked to above. As a novelist one would hope that he doesn’t need historians to teach him about the concept of subjectivity! :)

I just think the book sounds a whole lot more interesting if it’s about media reception, than if it’s about “the origins of the Second World War” which is what I did think when I originally looked at it and rolled my eyes at it. It’s probably still not very good even on that basis. But I’m not going to defend a book I haven’t actually read (or even re-flipped through since writing the post) any longer! If you haven’t already, I do recommend that you read Paul’s posts — they’re very interesting and I likely haven’t done justice to his argument here.

The description you quote is very revealing: the idea that the original readers of these articles had no context for them, that they didn’t organize their experiences in some meaningful fashion, is fairly absurd, bordering on the misanthropic. The assumption that all articles carried equal weight, that the juxtapositions he sees make any sense to a contemporary reader, are just unsustainable without context.

I love raw primary materials — use them all the time in teaching and writing — but selection itself is a form of argument, distortion.

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 suppose the question is, what is Human Smoke doing in the history section of bookshops at all? Art Spiegelman’s Maus isn’t usually to be found there, though it arguably should be …

Having said that, if historians are asked to review such a book, of course they are going to critique its view of history!

I think that’s a good analogy, actually, because it’s intended to shock, and the artist assumes that the audience will come to the same radical conclusion they did instead of actually making a coherent statement.