Mr. Holtsberry has a lineup of reviewers criticizing a World War II book by Nicholson Baker called, Human Smoke.

• Tom Nagorski says, Mr. Baker leaves the impression — one cannot say that he “believes,” since he is never quite explicit — that Roosevelt’s preparations for war with Japan were as bellicose in character as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and that the Allied failure to help Jews in the early years was as bad as the Nazis’ dispatching them to the gas chambers.
• Adam Kirsch calls the book perverted. “A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously. The problem is that people who don’t know enough . . . Already a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times has praised it for ‘demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.'”
• William Grimes writes: “Did the war ‘help anyone who needed help?’ Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.”