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Jump to full article: amazon.com, 2007-03-12
Author: Allan M. Brandt
Intro: this highly readable, exhaustively researched book: the cigarette's "remarkable success ... as well as its ignominious demise ... fundamentally demonstrates the historical interplay of culture, biology, and disease." Brandt, Havard Medical School's Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, explores the impact and meaning of cigarettes, from cultural, scientific, political and legal standpoints. Particularly fascinating (and shocking) is the scientific community's struggle to prove the harmful effects of smoking, even as scientists found, "in 1946, that lung cancer cases had tripled over the previous three decades." As any contemporary history of tobacco must, the narrative becomes a tale of the lies, deceit and eventual public exposure of Big Tobacco. But, the author warns, it's too soon for the ever-growing anti-smoking contingent to think they've beaten the industry: Big Tobacco is busy selling cigarettes to developing countries . . .
Though the industry can't be stopped, Brandt says, "understanding the history of cigarettes may be a small but important element in ... knowing their dangers and having strategies for their control"; fortunately, this rigorous history has that first step covered.
The cigarette--the ultimate icon of our consumer culture--serves as a vehicle for historian Allan Brandt to explore critical aspects of American life. From agriculture to big business, from medicine to politics, The Cigarette Century shows how smoking came to be so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law. In this magisterial book, Brandt demonstrates how the cigarette reflects the most powerful debates of our time about risk, responsibility, and human health. The Cigarette Century reaches across many disciplines to form a broad and compelling synthesis, showing how one humble (and largely useless) product came to play such a dominant role in our lives and deaths.
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