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'The Cigarette Century' by Allan M. Brandt 

Allan Brandt’s nuanced, intelligent, superbly researched history of the cigarette in the American 20th century tells you everything you need to know. The history of the cigarette is, in microcosm, the history of 20th- century capitalism itself, and Brandt follows it through culture, science, politics and the law.

Then he turns to the way in which big tobacco, partially thwarted at home, is now pushing its product into unregulated and lucrative Third World markets.

This is a work of scholarly history, rather than advocacy, but it makes a convincing case that the threat tobacco poses to global health is greater now than it ever has been.

That’s not to say this book is solemn. Brandt’s sense of the absurd makes it fascinating even as it appalls. Before the Marlboro Man, for example, there was Johnny Roventi, a 43-inch dwarf with the catchphrase: “Call For Philip Morris!” “He will go,” Fortune magazine reported admiringly, “wherever his dwarfhood, his voice, and his free cigarette will win him the eyes, ears and lungs of a crowd.”

Then there was the mechanical miracle of the Camel Man in Times Square . . .

As a tobacco company’s internal memo—with hilarious candor –put it: “Public suicide and voluntary spreading of diseases to innocent victims are never going to be socially acceptable or regarded as a characteristic of first-class citizenship.” Another one? No thanks, I’m trying to give up.

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