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A Florida circuit court has ruled in favor of a Stanford University professor who is trying to keep his unpublished book manuscript out of the hands of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, which had subpoenaed it as evidence for an upcoming suit.
Historian Robert Proctor plans to testify as an expert witness against tobacco companies in a number of cases brought by smokers in Florida. He is also working on an 800-page book, The Golden Holocaust, which describes, Proctor claims, the shaky scientific rhetoric and bogus clinical studies that tobacco companies used to sell their products. A judge in Volusia County (which contains Daytona Beach) ruled last August that Proctor had to surrender the manuscript, which Proctor says is largely jottings and notes at this point and not ready for other people to scrutinize.
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The Golden HolocaustA judge in Florida has ruled that Robert Proctor does not have to give his notes and unpublished manuscript of his forthcoming 800-page book to RJR.
In a case with potentially major implications for scholars and publishers, a Stanford University professor who often serves as an expert witness against tobacco companies is fighting an effort by lawyers for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to obtain the manuscript of his unpublished and unfinished book on that industry.
A Florida state court judge has already authorized the tobacco company's lawyers to issue a subpoena requiring Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford professor of the history of science, to make his book manuscript available to them so they can comb it for possible material to use in cross-examining him in a civil lawsuit pending there.
But the lawyers for the plaintiffs suing the tobacco company last week filed a motion asking the court to reconsider that decision and protect Mr. Proctor from being forced to grant access to the unpublished manuscript. Their motion calls Mr. Proctor their "single most important witness" in their case against the tobacco company, and argues that forcing him to share the manuscript would violate his privacy, his free-speech rights, his academic freedom, and his rights as an author.
Mr. Proctor, for his own part, refused to produce the manuscript at a recent deposition in the case and has retained a San Francisco law firm to fight the subpoena—as well as any other efforts to obtain his book—in California state courts.
In an interview Monday, he said of the book: "It's my private thoughts. They are not organized yet. They are not in finished form." . . .
The Florida court where the case is pending, the state's Seventh Judicial Circuit Court in Volusia County, possibly could entertain arguments for and against the subpoena at a hearing scheduled for Thursday. . . .
Robert M. O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia and a veteran scholar of issues related to academic freedom, said Monday that the legal fight over the manuscript "has profound implications" for academe. . . .
Mr. Proctor said Monday that lawyers for the tobacco company have sought for more than a year to obtain the manuscript to his planned book, tentatively titled "Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco." . . .
In a deposition filed in connection with the Florida case, he describes himself as one of only two professors of history in the nation who regularly testify against the tobacco industry, and alleged that "the tobacco industry has spent years trying to harass, intimidate, and use multiple legal means to prevent me from testifying in litigation." He said that his book "will contain previously unpublished information regarding tobacco-industry practices,"
Golden Holocaust: A History of Global TobaccoTentative title of Robert N. Proctor's work-in-progress. RJR is battling in a Florida court for a sneak preview.
Officially, Mr Chirac, 76, delayed the release of Mémoires – the much-awaited tome recounting his life from birth until 1995 – so he could re-read it one last time.
But Le Parisien claimed there were concerns the picture would break laws banning the "direct or indirect" promotion of tobacco and may have to be airbrushed.
The cover photo, featuring Mr Chirac in deep thought and thick glasses, was taken in 1976, some 12 years before he kicked the habit.
Mr Chirac is the latest in a string of celebrities to have their tobacco habit airbrushed out of photos or posters. . . .
Mr Chirac's publisher, Nil, denied any "censorship or self-censorship", insisting the release had been delayed as Mr Chirac was abroad on a visit to Africa, and the fuss was "absurd".
The newspaper Le Figaro remained dubious, saying it understood that a politician might no longer want to be associated with this "accursed object", but that it was "questionable to want to erase from the past anything that doesn't correspond to our contemporary values".
Not encouraging 'good health habits' ... the offending photograph of Barber. Photograph: PR
Author and journalist Lynn Barber has withdrawn from a literary festival after the local council refused to include a photograph of her smoking in its brochure for the event. Her ferocious interview technique earned her the soubriquet Demon Barber, but this is the first time she has been branded a potentially corrupting influence.
Barber, who writes for the Observer, was due to appear at Richmond's Book Now festival in November to discuss her memoir, An Education, which tells of the destructive affair she began as a teenager with an older man who picked her up at a bus stop. Her publisher Penguin had supplied a black and white photograph of Barber for inclusion in the festival's brochure, embroidered scarf around her neck, head thrown back, cigarette in mouth.
But Richmond council deemed that using a picture of an author smoking went against its responsibility to encourage "good health habits", and asked Barber to provide another. She declined and pulled out of the festival, saying that she had "always wanted to be a Smoking Martyr and obviously this is my opportunity".
"If a pic of me smoking is such a threat to the good burghers of Richmond, imagine what my presence would do," she said this morning. Barber, winner of five British Press awards, is also the author of a study of Victorian naturalists, The Heyday of Natural History, along with How to Improve Your Man in Bed and The Single Woman's Sex Book.
Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural. As you read this nicely proportioned, fast- paced book, you realize that Waxman was born to be a member of the House, ideally the chairman of an important committee. He's just five-feet-five, he's woefully short of hair, he's neither charming nor funny, but none of that has mattered. Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years.
Part of being a natural in Congress is owning a healthy ego. Ego can be the fuel on which the legislative branch runs, and Waxman is in no danger of running out of gas. He makes this clear in the first pages of his book, ably co-authored by Joshua Green, a senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly: "Nearly every worthwhile fight in my career began with my being badly outmatched," Waxman confides. "The other guys always have more money. That's why Congress is so important. Run as it should be, it ensures that no special interest can ever be powerful enough to eclipse the public interest." . . .
In these pages Waxman teaches the importance of good staff work, patience and the willingness to make unexpected alliances to advance your causes. He believes in oversight hearings, Congress's most basic tool, but one that has fallen into disrepair through disuse. He begins and almost ends the book with what must have been his favorite hearing of all time, one he held on April 14, 1994, just months before he and his Democratic colleagues would pass into the minority in the House, a kind of purgatory for an activist like Waxman.
On that occasion Waxman presided over the self-immolation of the seven chief executives of America's biggest tobacco companies, who, despite mountains of compelling evidence to the contrary, testified clumsily and unpersuasively, under oath, that they never believed smoking cigarettes was addictive. This hearing generated no immediate legislation, but it helped destroy the reputation of American tobacco companies and surely contributed to the environment that produced any number of new controls on smoking and the mammoth tobacco settlement with the states in the years that followed. . . .
"The Waxman Report" explains, at least, how Congress can work, and it is fun to read. You finish it with gratitude to the voters of Beverly Hills and nearby areas who keep returning this ornery fellow to the House to challenge entrenched special interests. More Henry Waxmans on both sides of the aisle would give us a much better Congress than the one we've got.
This weekend I read Waxman's forthcoming legislative memoir (a burgeoning and exciting genre), written with the assistance of Atlantic reporter Joshua Green, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. It's a very useful primer on congress and the long battles Waxman has led on behalf of a variety of key progressive causes. You also learn, strangely enough, that Waxman was one of the first members of congress to undertake the now common practice of donating to his colleagues' campaign funds in an effort to keep around representatives he saw as effective and curry favor. For all Waxman's idealism, you can't say he isn't savvy.
Waxman began his attempts to regulate tobacco in the early 1980s, with oversight hearings featuring Captain Kangaroo, and continued his work through then-Representative Dick Durbin's controversial 1987 amendment to ban smoking on airplane flights shorter than two hours, Waxman's own groundbreaking 1994 hearings where tobacco executives lied under oath, Newt Gingrich's torpedoing of a 1998 tobacco regulation compromise, and finally President Bush's threat to veto this bill last July that left it hanging...until today.
It says something about Waxman's tenacity and how political change comes about in the face of entrenched interests that it has taken nearly thirty years to achieve federal regulation
We have a justice system that treats drug use as a malevolent act of will (to be punished) and a medical profession that treats it as an unfortunate disease (to be cured). Who is right? In a magnificent new book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice , Gene M. Heyman, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, argues that it is not his fellow medical professionals.
Addiction is voluntary. The idea that addiction is a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” may be well-meaning but it is false. “Everyone,” Mr Heyman writes, “including those who are called addicts, stops using drugs when the costs of continuing become too great.” We need to make clear, though, what Mr Heyman means by “voluntary”. He does not deny that addiction is an enormous problem that can wreck a life, or several. If you drive drunk or embezzle money to pay for your coke habit when you ought to be studying, the consequences can be permanent and devastating.
But addiction is not the kind of problem that most people think it is. It is not so very far from setting interest rates, devising depreciation schedules and other economic problems of “intertemporal choice”. It involves weighing the value of a current good (intoxication) against the value of various future ones that are shrouded in uncertainty. . . .
The centrepiece of the disease theory of addiction is philosophical, not scientific. It is that nothing that produces sub-optimal outcomes as consistently as addiction does can be freely chosen. “No one chooses to be an addict,” as the saying goes. Mr Heyman shows that this is wrong – or at least that this is the wrong way of getting at the problem.
Patrick Basham has taken on one of the most intriguing deals in Washington -- how Philip Morris USA came to support Food and Drug Administration oversight -- in a new book titled Butt Out! How Philip Morris Burned Ted Kennedy, the FDA & the Anti-Tobacco Movement.
Basham is a director at the Democracy Institute, a Libertarian public-policy research group in Washington. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. . . .
Both Philip Morris and the anti-tobacco groups, mostly prominently the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, have denied those allegations for years. . . .
A. Though the alliance between anti-tobacco activists and the nation's largest tobacco company has been probed by some journalists, the public denials have tended to convince those who have not dug deeply enough. As I provide chapter and verse on how this unholy alliance has developed and worked, perhaps this will galvanize opposition to this travesty of public-health legislation.
Q. What do you think is the biggest revelation to come from your book?
A. That Philip Morris is really smart at pursuing its corporate interest and that Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Henry Waxman, and their anti-tobacco partners are really dumb at pursuing the public's interest.
As I show in my "scorecard of who won and lost," Philip Morris got virtually everything it wanted, while the anti-tobacco leadership in Washington struck out. . . .
Q. What role is there for smokeless tobacco products in society?
A. I'm finishing a second book on the smokeless tobacco issue.
Scientific evidence suggests it can be a very safe and viable alternative for those who need nicotine but don't want the risks associated with smoking.
It's unfortunate that both the federal government and the anti-smoking movement won't provide truthful information to smokers about smokeless products, instead leading smokers to believe that all tobacco products are equally dangerous, which is simply untrue.
Today, the art of smoking on film is all but dead. Yet the appeal of on-screen smoking remains in our cultural bloodstream. The television series Mad Men, featuring Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway (right), and the British Film Institute series on screen seductresses both celebrate the lost world of nicotine-chic. . . .
Today, the art of smoking on film is all but dead. Yet the appeal of on-screen smoking remains in our cultural bloodstream. The television series Mad Men, featuring Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway (right), and the British Film Institute series on screen seductresses both celebrate the lost world of nicotine-chic. When Donald Draper lights up, or a screen siren blows a smoke ring, it still sends a jolt, an aesthetic buzz that is peculiar to cigarettes. We are still hooked. This is the legacy of Edward Bernays. . . .
In a chilling memo to film producers, written in the 1950s, the golden age of smoking, Bernays laid out the various ways a cigarette could convey multiple meanings on screen.
"Everything," Bernays declared, "from the gayest comedy to the most sinister tragedy can be expressed by a cigarette, in the hands or mouth of a skilful actor."
This is only one example of the inspired and deeply calculating way in which cigarettes were implanted in the cultural landscape of America, and therefore the world. . . .
The medical and legal history of cigarette smoking is now well known. Less understood is the way that the cigarette came to reflect America's perception of itself: this was a triumph of marketing, a moral tragedy, and a tribute to human ingenuity, mendacity and fallibility.
In many ways, cigarettes defined modern America. As Allan M. Brandt writes in his brilliant deconstruction of cigarette-smoking history: "The cigarette permeates 20th-century America as smoke fills an enclosed room." . . .
Thanks to the wave of litigation that engulfed tobacco in the later part of the century, we know more about the inner-workings of the cigarette business than any other in history. Brandt is at his best tracing the slippery brilliance with which the cigarette makers clouded the issue: the health dangers of cigarettes were "unproven" . . .
One billion people across the world are expected to die of tobacco-related disease in the course of this century.
Defying the odds and raking in the dollars, Marlboro Man still rides the range: beautiful, immortal and lethal.
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. . . .
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the "chastely severe, time-honored classics" he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his "wooden Harvard chair," cigarette in hand.
A photograph of a late French general smoking cigarette published in a social science book of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has caused the anti-tobacco activists to up their ante. The National Organization for Tobacco Eradication (NOTE), a Goa based non-profit organisation, has written to the NCERT, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Goa government demanding withdrawal of the controversial photograph from the class 10 textbook.
On page 44 on the chapter "The Communist Movement and Vietnamese Nationalism", the late French general Henry Navare is shown smoking a cigarette.
“I am astonished to see such a mistake committed by an institution like NCERT," NOTE general secretary Shekhar Salkar told IANS.
“The picture of a military man smoking projects a macho man image. This will be read by millions of students and this will definitely have a negative impact on students," Salkar added.
[Sedaris talks of quitting because all the hotels, and France and Italy, had no-smoking policies; Lopate talks of quitting also.]
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
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.
At age fifty-two, Steve McKee learned that he was his father's son more than he had ever hoped--he, too, has serious cardiovascular disease. Haunted by his father's seeming surrender to the condition, McKee set out to find the man who died before the son could know him. In so doing, what might he, Steve McKee, learn of himself?
Chronicling the disorienting first days following John McKee's death, My Father's Heart is an extraordinary story of an all-too-ordinary scenario: A father dies, a son remains, and the loss casts a long shadow across a generation. Rich in evocative detail of time, place, and family, it is a powerful memoir of love, forgiveness, and finding oneself.