Word: smokes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This forlorn, tragicomic event appears in an extraordinary new book called Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster; 566 pages), an experiment in retelling the story of World War II using only brief anecdotes and snippets of primary sources--quotations, diaries, speeches, newspaper articles--placed in chronological order with a minimum of historical commentary. Human Smoke begins, for example, with a remark made by Alfred Nobel in August 1892: "On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops." The dramatic irony is rich...
...both Bakers in Human Smoke. Consider the loupe-eyed precision with which he recounts this atrocity...
...appears because as 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...
...Sunni Arabs have evolved," Petraeus says. "They realize that al-Qaeda has brought them nothing but indiscriminate violence and bloodshed and in many cases oppressive practices such as forced marriages. And in some cases bizarre practices such as breaking fingers of people who smoke...
...held the crudely fashioned bomb. He said witnesses placed a hooded man with a backpack riding a bicycle on the island before the blast. Police released a grainy surveillance video Thursday afternoon of the attack showing a bicyclist on the island immediately before the loud blast, which sent white smoke billowing through the empty intersection...