Baseless

Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels and six works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Hermann Hesse Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano.

Staggeringly good.   Counterpunch

A major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the modern Freedom of Information Act FOIA and the horrifying, decades-old government misdeeds that it is unable to demystify, from one of America's most celebrated writers

Eight years ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents from the early 1950s under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Years went by, and he got no response. Rather than wait forever, Baker set out to keep a personal journal of what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, and glacially slow governmental responses. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative that tunnels into the history of some of the darkest and most shameful plans and projects of the CIA, the Air Force, and the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. 

In his lucid and unassuming style, Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way, he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease, leaflet bombs filled with feathers, suicidal scientists, leaky centrifuges, paranoid political-warfare tacticians, insane experiments on animals and humans, weaponized ticks, ferocious propaganda battles with China, and cover and deception plans meant to trick the Kremlin into ramping up its germ-warfare program. At the same time, Baker tells the stories of the heroic journalists and lawyers who have devoted their energies to wresting documentary evidence from government repositories, and he shares anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his dogs and watching the morning light gather on the horizon. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the cruel secrets that the United States government seems determined to keep forever from its citizens.

INCREDIBLE TRADE REVIEWS: In advance of publication, BASELESS was lauded by Booklist, PW, and Kirkus, as well as Simon Winchester, who called the book "gripping," and Tim Weiner, who called it "A luminous meditation on the power of secrets and mysteries."UNMISTAKABLE PRESENT-DAY ECHOES: Much of what Baker writes about happened decades ago, but, today, at a moment when the US government is seemingly in a state of perpetual turmoil, it is inevitable that readers will wonder: what secrets is the current administration keeping from us?A GIANT OF AMERICAN LETTERS: There is only one Nicholson Baker. He has an extraordinary voice, which readers of his novels, essays, and journalism already know and love. In BASELESS, he is at the absolute top of his game, delivering a book no one else could even dream of.REVELATIONS ABOUT FOIA: The Freedom of Information Act and its limitations are well known to journalists, but never before has a book laid bare so plainly its flaws. At a time when investigative journalism is so relied on in American life, BASELESS will be an education and an alarm.RARE COMBINATION OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE: Baker is a first class novelist and stylist, but make no mistake the history and research on display here is expert. There are insights into the misdeeds of the CIA and atrocities committed by US forces in the Korean War which will shock even the most astute history buffs.