...[an] engaging, bracing, and moving new book ... There is something about scouring classified documents for long-hidden military secrets that attracts a certain type of obsessive. Nicholson Baker, who once wrote a 147-page essay tracking an archaic use of the word lumber through centuries of Anglophone literature, is that type ... Baker’s learned notes, down-the-rabbit-hole digressions, and verbal flash have invited comparisons with the virtuoso meanderngs of David Foster Wallace, though Baker comes off as gentler, less tormented by his demons, and, frankly, nicer ... What’s missing is the last and vital link, the official document that says, 'Yes, we did it. We doused turkey feathers with Songo fever and spread them around people’s homes. We introduced contagious new diseases into the land we were trying to help. And then we scooped up all the test animals from our germ warfare laboratories and threw them out of F-82s onto inhabited villages because we wanted to scare the bejeezus out of people, even if those people were children.' .... Baker has no such document, and he doesn’t pretend to. Yet if that evidentiary gap weakens his case that the United States probably waged small-scale bacteriological war, it strengthens his case for declassification ... It’s not just a matter of settling historical debates. It’s a bare-minimum requirement of a democratic foreign policy. Of having a government that, when contemplating a horrifying course of action, would think of posterity and choose something saner.

Baker’s effort to share his extensive knowledge has resulted in an awe-inspiring quest that reads like an adventure, a war story, and a scientific mystery of psychological suspense rolled into on. He uses a diary format, with daily entries from March 9 through May 18, 2019, that typically begin with brief asides about Baker’s beloved dogs or the mundane household chores he undertakes before launching, once again, into the world of biological warfare and his country’s ongoing attempts to hide its secrets. This approach proves to be an inspired choice as Baker’s formidable narrative skill and tenacity provide for a thoroughly riveting account and powerful testimony to the need for truth.

Unfortunately, [Baker] only adds to the ball of confusion that is our world today ... Baker’s proposed policy solutions, including a vast increase in declassification and transparency, and the termination of the C.I.A. as we know it, are all to the good...Yet too often, Baker’s search for the truth dissolves in his own prejudices and rampaging sense of moral superiority. Baseless is framed as a work diary he kept for three months in 2019, in which we are also treated to tidbits about his children, his wife, the two small dachshunds they adopted from the Humane Society in Bangor, Maine; the weather; what he’s eating...Baker is making a case for himself as a man of small and virtuous pleasures...By contrast, our leading Cold War wise men, with their 'deep crazy suspicions and enmities,' are 'not normal people.' Baker can be slashingly funny about this 'tiny handful of unelected desk warriors,' middle-aged men ... Yet Baker smears even the likes of this establishment with what he chooses to 'redact' on his own. His distortions, speculations and omissions outstrip any effort to note them all. Suffice it to say that in his view there is not a calamity anywhere in the world that was not caused by a United States government program ... wild accusations ... At times, the book is framed as a deliberate challenge to the intelligence community...But this is not how a historian proceeds. Again and again, Baker bristles with anger over actions that were 'seriously contemplated' by the C.I.A., other intelligence agencies and the military — but never undertaken ... I share Baker’s disgust with all the crazy, wasteful, illegal, counterproductive and murderous things the C.I.A. has done, and no doubt continues to do. Hell, I even like dogs. Baker’s Olympian worldview, though, takes him to almost the same place he landed in Human Smoke, his paste-up 2008 history of the road to World War II: immobilized by purity and concluding that we should never have intervened, even to stop the Nazis. Americans are neither beasts nor angels, just human beings trying to forge our way through the murky moral choices this world poses. To pretend otherwise is perhaps the worst deception of all.

Baseless: My Search For Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act has a promising concept, which is to use the topic as a way to examine the shortcomings of America's public records law. The book does not deliver on that promise ... According to the book's index, there are as many references to FOIA — 41 — as there are mentions of feathers and feather bombs. The book offers a handful of worthwhile meditations on secrecy and the need for public records, but they are the exception ... This book features, after hundreds of pages, Baker's best guess. But he does not present convincing evidence, and then the book just sort of ends ... Interspersed with studies about biological warfare are scattershot observations about his dogs' ears, his breakfast of boiled potatoes, the cold weather, and his myriad dreams — none of which are humorous or charming.

'Redaction,' writes Mr. Baker, 'is a form of psychological warfare directed against historians and journalists.' You don’t have to embrace his hyperbole to feel his pain ... Out of frustration, first, and then design, Mr. Baker switched from writing a purely investigative book to 'one about life under' FOIA—a 'diary, or daily meditation, on the pathology of government secrecy.' In this, he is not altogether successful. The diaristic structure is forced, and sometimes clumsy. He wrote the book’s first draft over nine weeks—from March 9 to May 18, 2019—and presents the writing done on each day as if it were a diary entry. This has the effect of turning a book that began life as an indignant inquisition into a form of forensic narcissism, in which momentous events of the past—wars, killings, hush-ups—seem to be as much about Mr. Baker as about America and its tussles with the communist world during the Cold War ... This impression is compounded by Mr. Baker’s decision to give readers a parallel narrative of his private life alongside his pursuit of evidence that would confirm that the U.S. government acted in ways that were evil ... It is hard to judge the legitimacy of the grand thesis behind Mr. Baker’s FOIA critique. He cites books in support of many of his assertions (though none by the eminent historians of the period), but those books, too, were written without access to the 'truth.' He thus relies, perforce, on the assertions of the enemy, who all claim, as they would, that the Americans were out to germ them ... And yet you can’t help feeling sympathetic to Mr. Baker’s primordial plight as you read his book. However risible some of his characterizations of people and events, and however hysterical his mistrust of America’s institutions of national security, there is no denying that the pathologically opaque way that FOIA works is a blot on American democracy. Arguably, though, any discussion of transparency needs to contend with the truism that governments, not least the governments of great powers, require some degree of secrecy to function in a dangerous world ... flawed but heartfelt.

Baker’s disillusionment is built into his book’s structure. Its chapters are diary entries written through the spring of 2019 that catalogue the scraps of knowledge he gleaned and his tussles with the FOIA infrastructure to get them. This format isn’t so much a sustained argument about America’s history of biological warfare as it is a real-life version of Groundhog Day; the book follows a circadian rhythm of file requests, denials, archive visits and attempts at dot-connecting, punctuated by dog walks and Baker’s puttering around his Maine home ... That structure gives the book a sweetly personal feel; no book about FOIA may be more accessible to a layperson. But it also accumulates storm clouds of despair. Baker has no firm, overarching story to tell ... almost inherently unsatisfying, like a memoir about a climb halfway up Mount Everest ... Still, it’s not wasted effort. Baker uncovers enough factoids — and reminds the reader of enough past U.S. military horrors — that it’s clear his hunger for clarity comes from a sensibly righteous place ... Baker is right to take on this battle as a challenge to America’s conscience in the long term.

... a genre-transforming blend of history and memoir, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of Baker’s research efforts, his home life and his worst fears about his own country. That makes Baseless essential reading for anyone trying to grapple with the role of the U.S. in global affairs since the end of World War II ... scrupulously sourced, as are all the other documents that Baker cites in his 50-page bibliography ... Baker will probably get grief from some quarters for seeing our nation — especially the CIA — in such a bad light. But as he points out, opening the records could put many conspiracy theories to rest.

The master feeling-tone Baseless evokes is horror ... There’s a sense of Baker unburdening himself. Baseless is marked by the first-person indignation of the private citizen – albeit a virtuosic novelist – rather than the game-face of the professional historian or journalist. This imbues it with 'dear reader' zeal and moral conviction ... This approach has its blind spots.

Structured as a series of diary entries in which he tells us what he knows for sure about American bioweapons efforts in that era, Baseless allows Baker to highlight that the government is still actively hiding things all these years later and to speculate about what they may be. At the same time, he tries to capture the frustration of growing older as the government runs out the clock on disclosing its secrets while they might still matter to anyone living ... I found myself wondering at this failure of imagination about what he could do. Why didn’t Baker reach out to one of the public interest organizations that provide free legal services to journalists and researchers with a righteous FOIA request and see if they would be interested in taking on his case? How can he publish a book that laments FOIA’s deficiencies—its subtitle is My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act —without doing what is necessary, if not always sufficient, to make that law work? ... Baker the person, interesting and imperfect as are we all in our own ways, rises from the pages of Baseless with a generally firm understanding that he has produced a very strange book.

...ever articulate and witty ... For readers who care about government openness, the narrative will be simultaneously illuminating and profoundly depressing ... Using both direct and circumstantial evidence, the author suggests that illegal weapons have been used against North Korea and perhaps against so-called enemy forces in other nations ... Readers should be impressed by Baker’s persistence, and most will end up charmed, however obliquely, by his obsessions.

America’s biological warfare programs are the focus of epic struggles for transparency in this mordant exposé ... Written with bemused fascination and occasional outrage...this lucid yet freewheeling narrative unearths much queasy detail about biological weapons and their promoters. The result is a colorful, engrossing recreation of a sinister history—and a convincing case for opening government archives to public scrutiny.