Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still…. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Please check your email to confirm your subscription to our newsletter. }; This was not that kind of book. This book features, after hundreds of pages, Baker's best guess. contact us. It's this concept that forms the backbone of Nicholson Baker's foray into the U.S. development of biological weapons in the 1950s. aj_zone = 'litbreaker'; aj_adspot = '517985'; aj_page = '0'; aj_ch = ''; aj_kw = ''; aj_pv = true; aj_click = ''; Nicholson Baker was born in New York in 1957. It is not natural for governments to embrace transparency — in fact, the greedy nature of institutional power, the siren song of secrecy, and the constant threat of embarrassment coalesce to form powerful incentives against it. We Insist: A Timeline Of Protest Music In 2020. Characters are introduced and quickly forgotten, never to be mentioned again. Access to government records are one of the public's only safeguards against this array of challenges. Send Letters To: The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN letters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number. The book is written in a daily diary style that serves to fragment the stories and create a dizzying, confusing effect on the reader. Excerpt from Double Fold (2001) The British Library’s newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. } else { if (window.innerWidth <= 600) { var aj_dim = 514841; } else if (window.innerWidth >= 1000) { August 2020. Governmental secrecy not only permits evil, but also breeds it. His exhaustion is evident. Born in New York, Nicholson Baker, 63, published The Mezzanine, a novel detailing a lunch hour, in 1988. 1) Nicholson Baker's Phone & Current Address, Nicholson Baker's Phone #, Address & More, Nicholson Baker's Contact Info, Social Profiles & More. Sponsored by BeenVerified. Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Coupons Guardian Puzzles app Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games More Nicholson Baker . The book has sparks of what it could have been: Take these ruminations on what redaction — common in almost any worthwhile responsive FOIA document — does to thinking: "Redaction is a form of psychological warfare," he writes, adding elsewhere, "If you blank many proper names and sections of many paragraphs, the import of an entire document becomes blurred... sometimes it works like loud crackly static.". The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. I started the book thinking it would feature a mystery that was either gradually solved by assiduous public records work — or frustrated by shortcomings of FOIA law.