Nicholson Baker’s new book, “Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Informatio Act,” is a major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the modern Freedom of Information Act – and the horrifying, decades-old government misdeeds that it is unable to demystify.
Baker, one of America’s most celebrated writers, probes the questions of what happens to a country’s sense of itself when major governmental programs and policies are kept secret for decades? How are we supposed to learn from our mistakes when those mistakes are steadfastly suppressed by the government agencies that made them?
