The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America

It's a thick, full book, happily inexpensive enough to buy one and take a look. It gives detailed, readable coverage of the rise and success of the cigarette (inhaling--"Do You Inhale? OF COURSE I DO!"--turned the tide in the cigarette's favor). Perhaps the product should be capitalized due to its success and power, i.e., the Cigarette, or King Cigarette). The book includes some court battles into which the author was reluctantly drawn (he had hoped to remain a researcher) but is not a law book. It is history-rich but not statistics-choked, and can be jumped into anywhere and still you'll stay afloat. Being on inexpensive paper made it affordable (unlike an excellent competitor's whose author was very interesting, even compelling, when interviewed on CSpan--but who could afford his doggone $$$ book!). From this book and other sources it is clear that the cigarettes we are exporting by the supertanker-load will kill many millions of lung owners, and nothing will stop it: cigarette profits are very high, enough to blind the makers to other considerations such as, say, morality (well, it is a matter of choice, right?). Unless some pivotal people get religion, it seems that a growing monster is loose. Someone even called our increasing exports of cigarettes the (coming?) greatest mass murder in history. (An aside: Forget about pipes and cigars--you don't inhale a stogie or take a drag from a bowl of Prince Albert.)

Yeah, I know smoking cigarettes [in excess] is not the best health choice an individual can make. That's why I smoke cigars, which have, unfortuantely, been lumped into the axis of evil by the prevailing anti-smoking sentiment now prevelent in our society even though the medical hazards simply do not manifest themselves in cigar smokers (or pipe for all that matters) as they do in cigarette smokers.I purchased this book to gain a better perspective on the current witch-hunt against tobacco and its users.Very well written and informative although somewhat repetitive.I will be donating my copy to the local cigar store that I frequent and I am quite sure many other [cigar/pipe] smokers will find it a worthwhile read.

If you can spare time to read just one book on the cigarette industry and its controversies, Allan Brandt's book should probably be the one. Although Brandt is an historian of medicine, his book focuses on social patterns.The Cigarette Century is a long read; expect fifteen to twenty hours. The "century" it explores ranges from about 1880 to 2005--from the invention of the Bonsack cigarette rolling machine, sponsored by the founder of American Tobacco, to the collapse of United States v. Philip Morris, started during the hapless Clinton administration but squashed by the corrupt Walker Bush administration.The best place to start may be at the end, a coda called Epilogue. There, Brandt shows how he emerged from academic historian to committed participant, serving as an expert witness for the prosecution during United States v. Philip Morris. That part of the book most clearly presents his outlooks.The Cigarette Century is organized by themes rather than chronology. There is a sequence of four partly overlapping themes: culture, science, politics and law--intended to explore key eras during development of the U.S. cigarette industry. Each has three chapters of similar length. This approach can make difficult reading, with cross-cutting events and abrupt shifts both forward and backward in time.Text with the four main themes takes about 430 pages. The 632-page book also has an introduction, a stand-alone final chapter on tobacco exports, the coda, an index, 75 pages of endnotes and 32 unnumbered pages of halftone figures--between pp. 184-185 and 408-409--with several historic cigarette ads. Choice of endnotes rather than running footnotes makes references difficult to follow and use.Brandt's writing style can seem anodyne: long words and sentences. In several places where tables or charts would help, there are long paragraphs instead, sometimes more than 300 words. However, the command of the topics is matchless. Brandt spent 20 years doing research, and there is no other single source for the wealth of information his book conveys.

This thick book is a groundbreaking study of the development of the machines that made it possible to mass-produce cigarettes, and the way they were sold and consumed from roughly the year 1900 to 2000. This book is generously illustrated with vintage cigarette ads, including testimonials by doctors and satisfied smokers. The author provides evidence that the medical harm caused by smoking became known to the cigarette industry as early as 1951, although the public at large was not allowed access to the evidence until much later. The author outlines the strenuous effects of the industry to frame the evidence as a "debate" about whether or not smoking can actually cause disease, and he summarizes studies that show conclusively that it does. The last quarter of the book covers the legal ramifications of trade in a substance that is now widely known to be dangerous, but which has been legal for decades. If you want to know how and why half the adults in the U.S. were at one time addicted to cigarettes, and how the status of smoking has changed, this is the one book you need to read.

This is a very readable introduction to this subject - although we know what the health issues are, it is interesting to understand the background in more detail as to how we got to where we are, and this provides that.