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Who Do You Think You Are? - Alyse Myers 

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

A Memoir.

By Alyse Myers.

250 pp. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. $24. . . .

Myers, who is vice president for brand programs at The New York Times, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Queens during the 1960s and ’70s, the eldest of three girls who shared a bedroom in an apartment so claustrophobic the changing world outside barely registered. Her mother’s constant smoking was as inescapable as the terrible rows her parents engaged in, unaware or uncaring of the traumatizing effects on their daughters. . . .

It’s only when she has a daughter of her own that Myers begins to understand and respect her mother’s efforts to survive. And when her mother is dying of lung cancer, Myers begins to recognize her own lack of compassion.

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Tony Horwitz's Book 'A Voyage Long and Strange' Looks for Little-Known Stories of American History 

Tony Horwitz’s new book, “A Voyage Long and Strange,” is about the American history most Americans never learned, including the story of the short-lived, early-17th-century colony established on this windswept island eight miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.

The book starts with the Viking discovery of North America, dispels a number of myths about Columbus (a much lousier navigator than we were taught) and then traces the various Spanish and French explorations of America before turning to the English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth. . . .

The Indians who met them on Cuttyhunk were "exceeding courteous, gentle of disposition and well conditioned," and made a very favorable impression, especially the women. "This is the rare story of gentle first contact between Europeans and Native Americans," Mr. Horwitz said. "Some of the other stories are pretty bleak. But here you get these wonderful details like 'drinking tobacco' together and descriptions of the natives as very 'witty.'"

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• Simon Gray has lung cancer but won't stop smoking 

The Last Cigarette, Simon Gray's memoir about giving up smoking - or, rather, musing about one day quitting since by page 243 his ashtray still overfloweth - ends with an arresting postscript. "I have a tumour in my lung... absolutely certainly, one way or another, I'm coming up to the last cigarette." There is a burning inevitability, of course, that a habit begun aged 7, pursued tirelessly, heroically even, through past health horrors including aneurysms and prostate cancer, peaking at 65 fags a day, would get him in the end.

Still, those of us who loved Gray's previous two volumes of The Smoking Diaries for their comic shambling and twinkling self-deprecation had hoped that he might, after all, prove the fag packet warnings wrong. At least now after radiotherapy, with more next month for a secondary tumour on his neck, Gray has finally given up trying to give up.

"I don't think I'd survive long without smoking," he says. "I think I'm an addictive personality. And that is my addiction. I don't think anything can replace smoking." Besides, he now fears that quitting itself might kill him: a film director friend attributes a recent heart attack to packing in after a lifetime. . . .

I expect him to eulogise about cigarettes, the rituals and paraphernalia. Instead Gray sees smoking as as much a weakness as a pleasure. He can understand the smoking ban, just wishes it was less authoritarian, permitted, perhaps, at certain fag-friendly restaurants. But he has controlled his own habit enough to get through dinner without sparking up on pavements. "At times I'm very grateful for cigarettes. It means one's life is run on a system of small rewards. You feel that you've earned a cigarette."

He regrets, however, that he has passed his habit down to his two children, both in their forties

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Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health 

Havanas in Camelot: William Styron's Personal Essays 

The most memorable entries in this collection deal not with such modern-day, talk show confessionals, but with more old-fashioned reminiscing about people and places the author once knew. In the title essay he recalls a boating jaunt in the summer of 1963 with John F. Kennedy, who handed him a Havana-made Partagas cigar.

“I was aware,” Styron writes, “that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods and that the embargo had been promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand.”

Several months later Styron ran into Kennedy at a fancy New York party. “Rose and I, entering the dinner, discovered him at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking momentarily lost and abandoned. As if arrested in an instant’s solitude, he was talking to no one and pondering his cigar. He had a splendid Palm Beach tan. He threw his arms around us and uttered a line so cornily ingratiating that it gave blarney new meaning: ‘How did they get you to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me!’

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The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries Volume 3 by Simon Gray  

Gray has been saying that this is the last book. He regards himself, at 70, as a very, very old man - which he isn't, but he plainly feels like one, beset by bereavements, hating his teetotal condition and full of the self-disgust of age. At one point he muses on the difference in meaning between "shaming" and "shameful", and calls on "hating" and "hateful" to help him out. The choice is not insignificant. At the end of the book, he reports the discovery of a tumour on his lung (the goal of giving up smoking, of course, was never achieved). But if he wants to stop writing these diaries now, he has certainly earned the right. It seems to me that the triumph of these books is not in how a man redeems himself, but how a writer does. Gray used to write unashamedly old-fashioned plays; being remembered for them alone would of course have been sufficient. But whoever could have predicted that at the end of his career he would hit on such an artful, brilliant, personal and glitteringly postmodern way of - well - settling his own hash?

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Book extract: The Butt, By Will Self  

Later, sitting on his corpse of a bed at the Entreati, it occurred to Tom that this conversation had been a sickening replay of the butt-flick itself: an unthinking ejaculation into the attaché's ear, followed by a massive overreaction. . . .

Tom now realised, with mounting horror, that his carelessly discarded cigarette butt had flown on its – perhaps fatal – trajectory powered by one fuel alone: a tank of combustible pride. He was Doing the Right Thing – and for that alone should be accorded the uttermost respect.

So the butt had described its parabola and hit its target, creating a minor entry wound, a tiny blister. But oh, the exit wound! The massive, gaping and bloody exit wound, through which the butt had sped on, fragmenting into scores of smaller butts, which were now hitting his children, his wife, and causing terrible collateral damage. . . .

But then, as Tom tried to convey the absurdity of a mere accident being treated as a crime, the attaché's manner changed abruptly, her tone becoming clipped. "See here," she said. "I'm not in a position either to judge your intentions or even to know exactly what it is you did. One thing I do know is that Mr Lincoln is an elderly man, and a very sick one. Another thing I know for a fact is that cigarette smoking is both personally and publicly injurious–"

"I was giving up!" Tom spat into the cell. "It was my last goddamn cigarette!"

"I'm going to have to stop you right there, Mr Brodzinski." The attaché's prissiness was shot through with menacing self-righteousness. "Embassy staff have the right to undertake our work free from the threat of physical violence or verbal intimidation. I'm going to have to terminate this call immediately, as a direct result of your speech acts. I suggest you cool off and pay a little more attention to your own responsibilities, rather than seeking more victims for your dangerous hostility."

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Smoking gun 

Will Self finds naturalistic novels 'preposterous', preferring satire to 'make people think'. His latest book, The Butt, is a political allegory modelled on Heart of Darkness . . .

Some of his novel's ambiguities gather around the smoking bans that the Anglos are keen on, which are partly responsible for the central character's troubles with the law. Self, who's been cutting down himself, is "not particularly opposed to smoking bans. If the only flag of liberation you have to wave is a Silk Cut, it's a pretty feeble kind of revolution." But in the book, "as the crazed anthropologist says at the end, it's more a question of what these utilitarian conceptions of social morality imply about the way in which we think about our civilisation". Self relates this to the west's "tendency to pitch up in places, imposing its own morality and its own kind of civil ethic on something it doesn't even understand". Despite, or because of, the Kurtz-like anthropologist's activities, the "actual indigenous people" in the novel "remain as unknowable at the end as they were at the beginning".

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On Deep History and the Brain 

In "On Deep History and the Brain," Daniel Lord Smail suggests that human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states. We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices -- from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels -- we've acquired to do so. Humans, Smail writes, have invented "a dizzying array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers," and those devices have become more plentiful with time. We make our own history, albeit with neurotransmitters not of our choosing. . . .

Three decades ago, in his influential study “Tastes of Paradise,” Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that “the brain is the part of the human body of greatest concern to bourgeois civilization.” Coffee and tobacco, which spread through Europe in the 17th century, helped this reorientation, Schivelbusch said: “Coffee functioned positively, arousing and nourishing the brain. Tobacco functioned negatively, calming the rest of the body ... as was necessary for mental, i.e., sedentary, activity.”

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清华出版《控烟报道读本》获2007年度中国优秀健康图书荣誉称号 

3月1日下午，由人民日报社《健康时报》与新浪读书频道共同主办，中国健康教育协会协办的“2007中国十大健康好书评选活动”在人民日报社举行了颁奖发布会。由清华大学新闻与传播学院常务副院长李希光主编、清华大学出版社出版的图书《控烟报道读本》被评为2007年度中国优秀健康图书荣誉称号。

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'Cigar Girl' mystery gave rise to detective stories 

THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL: MARY ROGERS, EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE INVENTION OF MURDER, by Daniel Stashower, Berkeley, 388 pages, $15, softcover . . .

What really happened to Rogers was never discovered. And though the death remains a mystery, Poe's work would later be recognized as the birth of modern detective stories.

"The Beautiful Cigar Girl" is Daniel Stashower's attempt at weaving the lives of Rogers and Poe together. What the award-winning author of "Teller of Tales" does is create a compelling narrative.

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Judge Dredd Writer - My Nightmare Vision Of A State Gone Mad Has Come True  

ALAN GRANT, the writer behind the infamous lawman Judge Dredd and the post-apocalyptic Mega-City One, has admitted he now finds it hard to write the comic because real life has strayed too close to his science fiction dystopia.

While doing research for his talk, Writing Tomorrow Yesterday: How Fiction Became Reality this Tuesday in Edinburgh, Grant skimmed through copies of Judge Dredd from the early 1980s and admitted he was amazed at how much has come true. The obesity epidemic, overcrowding and smoking bans all appeared in his comic strips. . . .

The smoking ban is another worrying example of science fiction becoming reality, according to Grant. A 1979 Judge Dredd storyline featured the Smokatorium, the only place in the city where people could smoke. "But instead of having a Smokatorium, they've made us go outside to do it," said Grant. "This blanket ban is, well, it's Judge Dredd. We deliberately set out to portray Judge Dredd as a fascist. And while our government is nominally a left-wing government, it has all the signs of a fascist government." . . .

Grant's talk is part of the Edinburgh Lecture series. Now in its 16th year, previous speakers have included Stephen Hawking, Seamus Heaney, Princess Anne and Mikhail Gorbachev. It will be chaired by crime novelist and fellow comic book writer Denise Mina, and is in conjunction with the Scottish Arts Council.

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• Painting the World  

VERMEER'S HAT

The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

By Timothy Brook

Bloomsbury. 272 pp. $27.95 . . .

China.

Vermeer's Hat thus aims "to capture a sense of the larger whole of which both Shanghai and Delft were parts: a world in which people were weaving a web of connections and exchanges as never before." To do this, Brook looks at seven works of art -- not all of them by Vermeer -- "for the hints of broader historical forces that lurk in their details." For instance, in the chapter titled "School for Smoking," he notices that 17th-century Dutch porcelain, representing Chinese scenes, often shows people smoking. Where did the painter get the idea that the Chinese smoked? This leads to an overview of tobacco commerce and consumption in Asia, building on accounts of the shipping routes, the trade laws and the movement of silver, as well as tobacco, to the East. But Brook also takes time to discuss the social impact of chi yan or "eating smoke."

Such interlacing of the economic with the social and ideological Brook labels "transculturation," . . .

Commercially, the 17th century was an age of silver, tobacco and slaves, and Brook shows how the three interconnect to form an intricate economic network. This new international economy is revealed in every aspect of life, not only in the account books of the VOC and the histories of the Jesuit missionaries in China and Latin America, but also in the items depicted in paintings by a Delft artist who died young. All our experience is global. As Brook writes in his final chapter, "If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world, then there is no part of the past -- no holocaust and no achievement -- that is not our collective heritage." Vermeer's Hat shows how this is true of the 17th century and by so doing provides not only valuable historical insight but also enthralling intellectual entertainment.

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Books of The Times: Those Sweet Mysteries of Life, Deciphered  

Tim Harford

THE LOGIC OF LIFE

The Rational Economics of an Irrational World . . .

The world is a crazy place. It makes perfect sense only to conspiracy theorists and economists of a certain stripe. Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “The Undercover Economist,” is one of these, a devotee of rational-choice theory, which he applies ingeniously and entertainingly to all kinds of problems in “The Logic of Life.” . . .

The premise is simple. Human beings are rational creatures who respond to incentives and rewards. No matter how bizarre a choice might seem, there is logic at work, and Mr. Harford intends to expose it.

“People smoke and gamble,” he writes. “Fools fall in love. Offices are run by morons. City neighborhoods boom or collapse for no apparent reason.” To the keen eye of an economist it all makes sense, in the counterintuitive way exploited so successfully by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in “Freakonomics.”

Smoking provides Mr. Harford with one of his more arresting examples. Nicotine patches and nicotine gum, intended to wean smokers from their dangerous habit, actually seem to encourage teenagers to take the first puff, for reasons that any economist might have predicted. Since there are now products to help smokers quit, it becomes less risky, as a purely rational proposition, to pick up the habit.

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My Father's Heart, by Steve McKee, Hardcover 

McKee pens an homage to his father's way of life, with its dutifulness and web of family and community ties, but also a critique of its toll. Reacting against his father's apparent surrender, the author turns his life into a rebellion against the inevitability of heart attack. He eschewed a workaholic career for the creative life and maintained a fanatical fitness regimen-running, rowing, triathlons, all manner of health food diets and nutritional supplements-only to learn in middle age that cardiovascular disease had caught up with him. McKee includes illuminating medical lore about heart attacks and oral histories from survivors. But most of all, he discovers in the most ordinary way to die a perspective on how to live. (Feb. 1)

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