Jump to full article: The Age (au), 2005-03-19
Author: Reviewer Cameron Woodhead March 19, 2005
Intro: Smoke : A Global History of Smoking
Since the first Europeans imported tobacco from the New World more than 500 years ago, smoking has become a global obsession. Whether you're a committed smoker or a zealous guardian of public health, this lush coffee-table book about the history of smoking is bound to fascinate. . . .
The essays collected in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking cover a diverse range of subject matter, from 19th-century opium dens to the crack-houses of today, from the therapeutic uses of smoking in Ayurvedic medicine to the increasingly vocal contemporary anti-smoking lobby, from ancient Mayan art to Weimar cinema.
More often than not, this book is intriguing and intelligently written. However, not all of the contributions are compelling: Zhou Xun's essay on smoking in modern China contains basic inaccuracies; Robyn L. Schiffman's Toward a Queer History of Smoking is tendentious in the extreme; the article on Ganja in Jamaica reads as if it were written under the influence of its subject matter.
The fact that the book places a massive emphasis on the exotic will doubtless incur the displeasure of anti-smoking Nazis.
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