As one would expect from a writer whose works include everything from a novel consisting of an extended phone sex encounter (Vox) to a controversial examination of the origins of World War II (Human Smoke), Nicholson Baker's second collection of essays, lectures and journalism, The Way the World Works, richly deserves the label eclectic.
Among these 34 pieces are a healthy assortment of personal essays, including a tribute to summer's simple pleasures and an account of a Sunday at the dump in his Maine home town. Baker also revisits the theme of Double Fold, his 2002 polemic against libraries' "assault on paper." The book purge overseen in the 1990s by Kenneth Dowlin, the former director of the San Francisco Public Library, is the subject of a savage attack in "Truckin' for the Future." But Baker praises the Duke University Libraries in a speech delivered at the opening of a facility dedicated to the storage of books.
In the lengthy "Why I'm a Pacifist," Baker argues that the lives of millions of Jews would have been spared had the Allies accepted the urgings of groups like the War Resisters League and negotiated an armistice with Hitler. It's possible to appreciate his diagnosis that "war never works" without accepting that prescription.
Recalling in "The Nod" a (literally) passing encounter with John Updike, Baker writes of how much he wanted to tell the author "how happy it made me to know that he was out there working." That's the way you're likely to feel after spending a few hours in Baker's company. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer