The Way the World Works: Essays

The Way the World Works: Essays

New York Times bestselling author Nicholson Baker has assembled a “provocative and entertaining” ( The Wall Street Journal ) collection of his most original and brilliant pieces from the last fifteen years. From political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the OED , and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola, Nicholson Baker ranges over the map of life to examine what troubles us, what eases our pain, and what brings us joy. The Way the World Works is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master. “Baker is one of the most beautiful, original and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades . . . and takes a kind of mad scientist's delight in the way things work and how the world is put together.” -- Charles McGrath ― The New York Times Magazine “[A] winning new book. . . . This singular writer . . . can mount an argument skillfully and deliver an efficient conclusive kick.” ― The San Francisco Chronicle “Nicholson Baker is such a swell, smart writer that he rarely - maybe never - tips his hand.... In Baker's view the mundane, closely enough observed, may be the skate key to the sublime.” -- Carolyn See ― The Washington Post “A fundamentally radical author . . . you can never be sure quite where Baker is going to take you. . . . [He] is an essayist in the tradition of GK Chesterton and Max Beerbohm, writing winning fantasies upon whatever chance thoughts may come into his head.” ― Financial Times (London) “What these works share is a sense that how we think, our idiosyncratic dance with both experience and memory, defines who we are.” ― The Los Angeles Times “His prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains.” -- Lev Grossman ― Time “Baker looks at the world around us in a way that is not only artful and entertaining but instructive.” ― Charleston Post & Courier “Mr. Baker is a wise and amiable cultural commentator worth listening to. . . . [his] prose is polished, witty . . . his essays are always provocative and entertaining.” -- Cynthis Crossen ― The Wall Street Journal “Baker's new essay collection, The Way the World Works , is always absorbing, merging his interest in solid, tangible objects with his devotion to the life of the mind. . . . simply dazzling.” ― Seattle Times “Exhilarating . . . Eye-opening . . . Baker continues his project of bringing new dimensions and idiosyncrasies to the personal essay, which he is devoted to reviving and reinventing.” ― The Boston Globe “If only more of the literary world worked the way Baker does. . . . You cannot deny the courage of the writer. . . . Baker is singular.” ― The Buffalo News Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper’s , and The New York Review of Books . He lives in Maine with his family. Way the World Works FOREWORD Back in 1982, when I was just getting going as a writer, William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic, called to say that he was putting together a 125th-anniversary edition and he wondered if I had anything short to contribute to the front of the magazine. Flattered, I wrote something that tootled around in a ruminative way called “Changes of Mind.” Other pieces followed, and I allowed myself to believe that I was helping to bring back the personal essay, which had fallen out of fashion. Some of my heroes were G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Morley, Alice Meynell, William Hazlitt, William James, and Samuel Johnson. By 1996 I had enough for a collection, The Size of Thoughts. Now it’s 2012 and time, it seems, for a second and slightly heftier accrual. The first section of the book, LIFE, is made up of autobiographical bits arranged more or less chronologically; then come some meditations on READING and being read to. After that I tell the story of how I sued a public LIBRARY and talk about the beauties and wonders of old NEWSPAPERS; and then comes some TECHNO-journalism and writings on WAR and the people who oppose it, followed by a LAST ESSAY that I wrote for The American Scholar on mowing the lawn. I like mowing the lawn, and it didn’t seem quite right to end the book with an impressionistic article on my unsuccessful efforts to master a series of violent video games. You’ll find things in here about kite string, e-readers, earplugs, telephones, coins in fountains, paper mills, Wikipedia, commonplace books, airplane wings, gondolas, the OED, Call of Duty, Dorothy Day, John Updike, David Remnick, and Daniel Ellsberg. In a number of places I’ve changed a title, or restored a sentence or a passage that was cut to make something fit. I hope you run into a few items that interest you. My thanks go