He now lives in an old farmhouse in Maine, but Rochester can still claim native son Nicholson Baker. Not only did he attend School Without Walls and the Eastman School of Music, but the setting of his first novel, "The Mezzanine," was based on the escalator at Midtown Plaza.

Since 1988, Baker has published 11 books and joined the ranks of the country's top writers, but his books have not been conventional or safe.

His career began innocently enough with "The Mezzanine," an often hilarious exploration of the excruciatingly mundane details of life. But later came "Vox," a novel about phone sex that had the distinction of serving as Monica Lewinsky's Christmas gift to Bill Clinton in the late 1990's. Then Baker plunged deeper into sex with "The Fermata," the story of a man who liked to stop time and take the clothes off women.

In 2001 his non-fiction book, "Double Fold," excoriated libraries that were disposing of old books and newspapers and, in Baker's view, abandoning their mission. (Baker is notorious for preserving important literary artifacts. Last month a New York Times article dealt with his bittersweet parting with the 6,000 bound volumes of newspapers that he had used part of his retirement money to rescue. He donated them to Duke University.)

A few years ago his most recent novel, "Checkpoint," dealt with the efforts of one character to convince another not to assassinate George W. Bush.

But his new book, "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization," is the most controversial of them all. In it Baker dares to reconsider the conventional wisdom about World War II and to suggest that British and American involvement was not as justified as the vast majority of people believe.

The book merited a cover story (and a positive review) from the New York Times Book Review. It got a rave from the Los Angeles Times, which called it "one of the most important books you will ever read." But it's been greeted negatively by many publications, ranging from Commentary to The Nation.

Whatever critics think of the book, it is obvious from his tone and the emotion in his voice when he discusses the war that Baker has thought deeply about the meaning and consequences of the events he writes about.

In an interview by telephone, Baker discussed the book, war, and pacifism. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

City: In "Human Smoke," you examine the build-up to United States involvement in World War II, not from the position of hindsight, but from day-to-day writing in newspapers, journals, and diaries, and recollections from memoirs. Why did you choose this format?

Baker: The purpose was to feel my way through this massive disaster in its early phase and suffer through it on a human scale. I wanted to break the big narrative of the war up into many, many tiny stories, because that's where we live. That's the real scale of our lives. It's not statistics and diplomatic initiatives spanning five-year periods. It's what happened on a single day. The purpose was to construct a kind of constellation of moments of decision or suffering or heroism that would allow a reader to move feelingly through the early phase of the war.

In the conventional wisdom, World War II is almost synonymous with the words "just war." What made you want to challenge that notion?

I don't think I started by wanting to challenge the notion of a just war. I had a newspaper collection and read the papers from the time and felt I had some new discoveries. I wanted to let the diaries and newspaper articles and secondary sources lead me to whether it was a just war or not. Sometimes, on certain days, it seemed to be that way. Other times, the West's response seemed so hideously off the mark that I thought that should be put on the record as well.

I think anyone who reads this book, as opposed to reading 30 pages and using the index, will see that it's full of the kind of contradictions that you have in real life. You have one person saying one thing, and it doesn't fit with what someone else is saying or doing. So I, as a writer, and you, as a reader, have to come up with a theory: Why is this person saying that? How true is it? Is this person a good guy?

That kind of thinking is the necessary first step before you ask the question, "Is it a just war?" kind of means you put everything in a blender, and you come up with a verdict. You first have to know what you're dealing with grain by grain.

Your accounts of Churchill portray him as a man who has almost a sporting attitude toward bombs. And you portray Roosevelt as a man who taunted Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor. Both were anti-Semites. And yet they are almost universally regarded as great men. Is this because the leaders in Germany and Japan were far worse?

Hitler is obviously at the nadir of human behavior; he's a man with a fantasy of exterminating a whole people. That was in motion from the very beginning. The source of Hitlerian power was this tremendous fanatical hatred. That wasn't true of Churchill or Roosevelt.

These are all such different men and so complicated. And they go through phases, especially Churchill, who was a man of massive mood swings. When he was in his depressions, he was a totally different human being than when he was in his manias. He developed real extreme, almost paranoid theories about Bolshevik and Jewish influence. He also said many positive things about the Jewish homeland.

The reason I quoted some of his casual anti-Semitism and veiled references from the 1920's was to make the point that this genteel anti-Semitism was worldwide, and it was part of the reason why the Jews were trapped in Germany. When it came down to it, England and America wouldn't let them in, and that was embraced by the Nazis as proof that their distaste for the Jews was shared by the entire world.

But the anti-Semitism that was extant in Germany was a very different kind. It was a poor, skinhead movement, low-income in the midst of a depression, fierce, massively regimented, militaristic, not the kind of highbrow, Rooseveltian anti-Semitism in which quotas went up at Harvard.

The problem is the two worked together to trap the people who were actually suffering. The important discovery for me, in reading the sources for this book, is that the people most interested in helping the Jews were also the most compelling voices in opposition to a military response for Germany. The pacifists and the people who wanted to help the Jews were one and the same.

You present all of this in a matter-of-fact way with no commentary, letting the vignettes paint their own picture. But several critics accuse you of cherry picking and say that what emerges is not an honest picture. What criteria did you use in selecting these fragments?

All history is, in a sense, cherry picking, because the cherry orchard is infinite. Anybody who's telling any story about the past has to choose. It seemed to me important to concentrate on the really troubling themes: what was happening in Germany to the Jews, what was happening in Poland to the Jews, and what was happening as responses to those actions.

So the starvation blockade is extremely important. And the building and outfitting of nations with bombers is important. Those are the things that caused the most harm, suffering, and death. I wanted to do it in a way that would be compelling. I wanted to tell stories that would make some larger point but would be doing it obliquely.

Absolutely I'm cherry picking if you define cherry picking as looking for those cherries that have pits that will make you cry or understand or reach some new point of knowledge.

War is obviously the most horrible exercise in who will blink first. If countries refuse to fight, this would probably shorten a war and save lives. But what do you think the consequences would have been if Churchill had not fought Hitler and America had stayed out of the war?

The way people justify the war is by saying, "Well, what would you have done?" and I think that is a legitimate question. There are several points at which I think that a negotiated truce would have done more to unseat Hitler and make it possible for other, more moderate forms of government to take over in Germany. It sounds good to say you have to resist Hitler, but what that means if you're a foreign country is you have to figure out how to kill as many Germans as possible. When you start doing that from the air at night and through blockade, what you do is unite the German nation.

It's precisely what happened in 9/11, I'm sorry to say. Our country was attacked. It was basically a massively destructive firebombing of two buildings, and immediately there was a rage reaction. Lots of people were put in prison; due process was suspended, phones were tapped, and two countries were invaded. It was a surge of irrational hatred. Alongside that, the leader of the time became immensely powerful and his entire government was reinforced. Everyone supported him because we were attacked.

Something very similar to that happened in Germany. Cologne was bombed regularly from 1940. All those people in Cologne who are just people are suddenly defenders of their ability to sleep through the night. They look around, and the saber-rattlers and screamers, the crazy fanatics, the people who are blaming the Jews, are suddenly listened to.

That is at the core of why this book carries a freight of really uncomfortable truth. I just quote the actual statements of the German press and even the historian Shlomo Aronson, who says - rightly, I think - that the British bombing campaign, in the short run, served to unite the German nation behind Hitler. That's a frightening thought. That's essentially the most frightening thing you can think of, that an act of resisting something as terrible as Nazism would actually strengthen it.

In the recent Ken Burns series on World War II, one of the Americans who had been a prisoner of war described a situation in which a German soldier questioned him about where he lived. When he mentioned his town, the soldier named the nearby rivers and other geographical details. When he asked the German how he knew, he said he'd been assigned to do research on territories projected for acquisition.

The hypothesis that Hitler wanted to take over the entire world is an "if." I would have to put up against that "if" that Hitler was a dictator who wanted to consolidate his conquests. He repeatedly said he wanted peace with Britain. He said, in fact, that he admired Britain. He based the Luftwaffe on the way the British Royal Air Force had policed recalcitrant tribes in the 1920s.

It's quite possible that Hitler and the rest of the Nazis, especially as their fortunes in war began to slide, had a fantasy of world conquest just as they had a fantasy, from the very beginning, of exterminating the Jews. The question is: when does a fantasy become a reality?

If a massive flotilla of German boats and planes started coming toward the United States, I think we would have defended ourselves with fighter planes, and destroyers, and troops, and everything else, but what we did instead was to say we were defending ourselves by building thousands of heavy bombers, which have no defensive function, and attacking German cities. That doesn't make any moral sense. You can be an old-fashioned militarist and still see that this was the wrong thing to do.

The first action always has to be to think about who is suffering in a particular situation. In Europe at the moment that Hitler invaded Poland, the people who were suffering were the Poles, the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jews. Those were the people we should have tried to help. The sad irony is that the first action when Churchill came to power was to tighten the blockade against Poland.

So Hoover's food relief agency could no longer get food to Polish ghettos.

You have to forget the fantasies of world leaders and concentrate on trying to help the people who need help. That's the basic question of the book: Did the war, as it was fought by the West, actually help the people who needed help?

There is a quote in your book from Mihail Sebastian that I found very powerful: "Everyone disapproves and feels indignant, but at the same time everyone is a cog in the huge anti-Semitic factory that is the Romanian state, with all its offices, authorities, press, institutions, laws, and procedures." It seems to me there are three choices: participate in the system, resist by doing nothing, or go down fighting that system, which is not a pacifist response.

My heroes are Mihail Sebastian and Victor Klemperer. They did not go down fighting, they did not try to blow anything up or sabotage anything, they bore witness and wrote works of great literature in the midst of brain-scrambling, terrifying confusion. Those are my heroes, along with the relief organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Quakers who helped Jews escape through various quiet channels.

I think Aldous Huxley was right when he said that if you resist an evil with evil it just makes things worse. Or when Jeanette Rankin says after Pearl Harbor a very simple, naïve sounding thing: killing more people won't help. I think she's right, and there is a terrible, terrible moral stain on British and American history - the good guys - people that I have a bond with.

I've never really understood Germany. England - and the English system of laws, evolved over hundreds of years - I love, and because of that, I want England to do the right thing. When they do things that seem appallingly bloodthirsty, I'm distressed in a different way than I'm distressed when Hitler does something bad, because I think we can all stipulate that he was just about the worst person who ever was born. England was saying we'll go down fighting, but what they were doing was precipitating the fight.

To bring up to a current example of genocide, the Janjaweed go on burning villages and killing and raping people in Darfur. Is it more moral to sit on the sidelines or to try and stop the genocide with, say, a United Nations force?

You want to do something that is right, not just something that sounds right. Sending an army into a place and calling it a police force or occupying a country doesn't necessarily work. The people who are actually trying to help in Darfur are the same kinds of people who were trying to help in 1938. They're the people who were saying we need people witnessing what's going on, people who are themselves willing to be unarmed and in harm's way.

I am enough of a pacifist to say that military intervention almost always makes a situation worse. A peace-keeping force ends up killing people and becomes corrupted by its mission.

The first thing I ever read by you was a short piece in the New Yorker comparing Rochester's ice storm with the bombing of Bagdad during the first Gulf War. I assume you are against the current war in Iraq, but do you think we should still be trying to bring Osama bin Ladin to justice?

Any attempt to assassinate, take down, go after people, is always attended by disaster. Because the United States saw that World War II was an extremely costly, miserable cataclysm, this country attempted, during the Cold War to control the world through assassination. The attempt was a total failure.

A failed assassination attempt simply increases the power and the kind of mystical sacred aura that surrounds a dictator. It happened with Hitler himself. He escaped an assassination attempt early in the war, and then it was billed as the miraculous salvation of the Fuhrer.

The United States has to become more vulnerable. I think it has to entirely renounce its network of military bases, which are an enormous part of the problem, and speak gently. Gentleness propagates gentleness and truculence and slamming swords around makes other people do the same.

Would you be a pacifist regarding an attack on your family?

That's a legitimate question that people always ask pacifists. My response to that is no, I'd probably do everything that I could to defend my family. The problem with the question comes when the model of self-defense and defense of one's own immediate family is imposed on a nation. A nation just doesn't have the characteristics of a single person or a single family unit.

The role of the single arm that I would swing around is now taken up by thousands of human beings who are being ordered to fight at a distance using machines. The model of self-defense fails when you read it onto national behavior.

I've been mugged. What the cops say is when somebody comes at you with a gun and says give me your wallet, you don't say, "In the name of my honor and dignity I am going to fight to the last," you give your wallet. You submit physically, not mentally. You say, "Take my wallet" and mentally, you think, "You bastard." You give him the wallet, because it doesn't matter.

Here's another analogy. A man with a history of violence and an obvious insanity takes a bunch of defenseless people hostage in a building. The good guys get together and say, how do we respond? He's a madman and he's talking about killing the hostages. And one person says, "I know: we'll shoot out the windows and set fire to the building."

That is a course of action that is not calculated to save the hostages. World War II was not fought to save the Jews. It is now defended as an attempt to save the Jews. The war "radicalized," as historians say, this totally irrational minority anti-Semitism.

Your book is about the years leading up to our involvement, so it doesn't cover the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Burns film and in most historical accounts, the Japanese are portrayed as so fanatical that nothing short of that kind of devastation would make them surrender. I'm sure you've heard the argument that bombing those cities was a last resort that actually saved millions.

It wasn't what Curtis LeMay said a few months afterward. LeMay had firebombed Japan from one end to the other, and he thought that his air force had won the war. The firebombing of Tokyo was extraordinarily destructive. All of that happened before these nuclear attacks. What LeMay said was that the atomic bomb had not won the war, that the Japanese were willing to negotiate, that they were sending out feelers.

There's no question in my mind that the reason for using the atomic bomb was that this locomotive of technological novelty was moving ahead and they chose cities that were relatively unscathed to demonstrate its effectiveness. It was a new element in the balance of world power that had to do with Russia.

The full title of your book is "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization." What did you mean by this?

The basic principle of civilization is that you are accountable for your own acts, and if you do something wrong then you are punished for it. I think if you were living in Warsaw or watching London burn, or watching your entire country, which had built all kinds of things - refrigerators, cars - every factory being turned to the production of tanks, rifles, and bomber engines, it felt like the end of civilization.

Civilization went on hiatus for five years. People spoke and acted with a public ferocity that the world had never seen before. Obviously afterwards things got better. But why were these restraints lifted at this point? What were the many decisions that gradually removed the possibility of mercy?  That was the task of the book to ask. The war was not good in any sense - it was a universal groan of mechanized brutality and blood lust that we're still recovering from.