9780593211090
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Baseless audiobook

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Baseless Audiobook Summary

“Staggeringly good.” —Counterpunch

A major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the modern Freedom of Information ActFOIAand 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.

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Baseless Audiobook Narrator

Nicholson Baker is the narrator of Baseless audiobook that was written by Nicholson Baker

About the Author(s) of Baseless

Nicholson Baker is the author of Baseless

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Baseless Full Details

Narrator Nicholson Baker
Length 15 hours 31 minutes
Author Nicholson Baker
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date May 02, 2024
ISBN 9780593211090

Subjects

The publisher of the Baseless is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: fathers day, fathers day gifts, political science books, us government, gifts for history buffs, journalism, gifts for dad, geopolitics, political gifts, history gifts, history books, history, political books, politics, political science, baker, american history, biography, cia, us history, war books, biographies, government, american history books, autobiographies, international politics, world politics, biographies of famous people, political philosophy, historical books, cyber security, american, autobiography, literature, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage, History, United States, 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Literary The BISAC Subject Code is Intelligence & Espionage, Political Science

Additional info

The publisher of the Baseless is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Penguin Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593211090.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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