Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Trium ph of Philip Morris

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER . No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes-mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product-with such sweep and enlivening detail. "A great battleship of a book-formidable, majestic."-The New York Times Book Review Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process-financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal-are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace. We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday-to some, indispensable-habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers. This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and reduced dosages of tar and nicotine. We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and (b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk. Among the eye-opening disclosures here- outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market. Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense.

Reviews

"A great battleship of a bookformidable, majestic ... armed with an abundance of revealing information, guided with discerning literary skill.... Mr. Kluger invites one to admire these moguls of tobacco the way one appreciates, say, Leninas brilliant strategists and resourceful technicians ... single-minded in their determination to satisfy [a mass want] and heedless of the human cost of their profit making. A behind-the-scenes history of an industry whose structure, power, and growing vulnerability are so richly illuminated by this monumental and timely book." The New York Times Book Review

"[Ashes to Ashes is] monumental ... elegantly written.... It will probably be the definitive volume of the subject of cigarettes in the 20th century." Time Magazine

"Lively, entertaining, awesomely comprehensive.... The quality ofKluger's work astonishes throughout: He actually persuaded many top tobacco executives to talk with him.... Getting the kind of good stuff Kluger pulls together is just about miraculous." The Washington Post

Author Bio

RICHARD KLUGER began a career in journalism at The Wall Street Journal, and was a writer for Forbes magazine and then the New York Post before becoming literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune during its final years. In book publishing he served as executive editor at Simon and Schuster, and editor-in-chief at Atheneum. A fulltime writer since 1974, he is the author of two other works of social history-Simple Justice, an account of the epochal 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, and The Paper, on the life and death of the Herald Tribune; each was nominated for the National Book Award. The best known of his six novels are Members of the Tribe and The Sheriff of Nottingham. Kluger and his wife, Phyllis, who have two sons and have written two novels together, live near Princeton, New Jersey.