Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

This is a long but generally fascinating book. I was rarely less than interested and to me it was a disappointment to get to the end and have unresolved issues raised (simply because the story was ongoing when written). There is a short afterword to this edition that takes the story from 1996 to 1997. The author spoke to a lot of players in the story and this comes across in the telling. This is a work of journalism as well as history. Mostly fact-based journalism - the author does express views through the story but often covers a variety of points-of-view before arriving at a conclusion.The main story threads are the growth of the tobacco industry, development of an understanding of the health issues and the cigarette industries responses to them, the marketing of product, government responses, the growth, changes in various of the main companies over time - especially the rise of Philip Morris to the major global player (It is this story I found the least interesting - there are a lot of discussion of company politics and paragraph introductions to some fairly insignificant corporate players), and the growth of the anti-tobacco forces. I thought the coverage of a major court case (Cipollone v cigarettes companies) was particularly gripping.My wife read the updated kindle version when it arrived and didn't find many text errors at all.This is the first non-fiction work I have read on the kindle and I missed the ability to use an index, but it is useful to have the bibliography here.Overall I can highly recommend this work but hopefully the kindle version can be corrected to become as fascinating a story as the paper version.

The strongest part of the book follows the business side of tobacco. The author is especially adept (as you would expect from a novelist) at sketching out the players in the history of tobacco. He is also very good on the history of various cigarette brands, their composition, advertising, their ups and downs, sales strategies. This is the best part of the book. A number of wonderfully told stories and incidents pepper the book. The author weaves this information into a steadily growing body of evidence that smoking is harmful, and then pits the industry figures against scientists, and tosses in politicians and anti-smoking groups as the battles go on. The book has one glaring weaknesses, obvious to anyone. The author badly needed an editor to exercise control over his tendency to go off course and to go overboard and tell everything he knows about something. For example, the business diversification of Philip Morris is really tangential to the story, and should have been cut. The author's style is encyclopedic, which is not a problem at first, but it wears the reader down by the halfway point. The author seems very weak in essential areas of chemistry and biology. At one point he even refers to cellulose as "protein-like". He struggles badly with the effect of air and flue drying on the chemistry of tobacco, particularly nicotine. He seems to miss the boat on ammonia technology and the rise of Marlboros. But maybe that information came out too late for him to include it.

There is no question but that the book was exhaustively researched and tells you everything you might want to know about the tobacco industry over the past 100 years. Often it was compelling reading as well. But it seems to me it could have been a good deal shorter and still have gotten the main points across--say under 450 pages rather than 750 pages. It seems that every fact Kluger ever uncovered went into this book. As a general matter, I also found the book much more interesting when it was talking about the "bad guys" (i.e. the tobacco industry and particularly their advertisers), rather than the efforts of the various anti-tobacco groups to show the harmful effects of smoking. I found those sections comparatively tedious. No question that the book is quite an accomplishment though and I would certainly recommend it although I didn't find it necessary to digest every word

This is the finest work on the critical subject of tobacco that I have ever read, Mr. Kluger's research is incomparable on a subject that so badly needed it. Earlier tracts on the subject were either incomplete or so didactic as to become opaque. The tragedy of tobacco production is that the moral failure was not seen as the crime it clearly was. This book explains authoritatively and in measured tone how the crime played out and is still playing out. The further tragedy of this story is that it has become a blueprint for deadly production in other industries e.g. fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals. This is not a story of designing a product but of designing a deceptive means of selling a deadly product. Delightfully, Mr. Kluger also writes very well, turning a dreary and disgusting history into the dramatic tale of depraved capitalism.

The primary competition for this book's potential readership is Allan Brandt's  The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America  . I say Brandt's is the better choice mainly because Kluger becomes so bogged down in minutiae that I found myself skipping many paragraphs (e.g., recitations of the accounting jargon associated with tobacco company stock transactions, exhaustive biographies of minor figures, overly technical discussions of the biochemistry and histology of tobacco-borne diseases, etc.) In contrast Brandt's eloquence and pithiness made me not want to miss a single word.

The author takes you to the depths of the smoking industry and their relentless effort to increase their profits and disclaim all the health and moral hazards of smoking.

It amazes me just how twisted our society is. How we can't seem to learn from previous mistakes and have to keep trying to infringe on the rights of others just because we don't agree on something. That is the basics of freedom, that you don't have to agree so long as you don't take away the rights of others.

Hugely interesting