Word: baker
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...Republican leaders in the upper chamber are closer to the Democrats in the House than their leader in the White House. They have publicly urged that the growth in the Pentagon budget be cut to about 5%. The more pragmatic members of the President's staff, led by James Baker, are hoping for a compromise at about 7%. For them to persuade the President to come down to that level may be as difficult as getting Republican Senators to come...
...hard to argue with somebody who won't argue. It's almost like there's an unspoken analogy at work between Gandhi's nonviolence and Baker's noncommentary: Baker declines to take up arms in support of his thesis, as if to do so would be to commit rhetorical violence against the facts. But facts, even tragic ones, require context and interpretation. They don't speak for themselves. That's why we need historians...
...roving archival eye that selected and arranged these snippets is attached to the remarkable brain of novelist and critic Nicholson Baker. Baker occupies a curious position in American letters: part genius, part crank. His best works--his novels The Mezzanine and A Box of Matches, and U and I, his book-length study of John Updike--contain passages so beautifully observed and perfectly formed that they stick in the mind for years. His lesser works--the sweaty, oversharing sexcursions Vox and The Fermata and his tetchy political rant Checkpoint--contain passages you could spend years trying to forget...
...Baker isn't interested in just changing the way we write history; he wants to change our minds about what happened and what should have happened. He shows us a vain, bloodthirsty Winston Churchill overeager to wage war and not overly particular about bombing civilians. He shows us Franklin D. Roosevelt turning away European refugees and baiting the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. As a counterweight, Baker spotlights international pacifist movements, with Mohandas Gandhi as their principal spokesperson. Ultimately Baker appears to be making the argument that no violence is ever justifiable, even in self-defense, and that, in Gandhi...
...vivid and visceral as Human Smoke is, it has a maddeningly slippery quality. In presenting bare facts unadorned by any commentary, Human Smoke cloaks itself in an aura of limpid, virtuous purity. But beneath that cloak, things get a little murky because in presenting the facts as he does, Baker is making an argument that he doesn't explicitly state. Does he really believe--as he seems to--that aerial bombing is on a moral continuum with Nazi genocide? And that Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jews is comparable to Churchill's hatred of the Germans and Japanese...