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 The Cigarette CenturyThe Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined Americaby Allan Brandt Mar 12, 2007
DescriptionThe invention of mass marketing led to cigarettes being emblazoned in advertising and film, deeply tied to modern notions of glamour and sex appeal. It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness. And no product has received such sustained scientific scrutiny. The development of new medical knowledge demonstrating the dire harms of smoking ultimately shaped the evolution of evidence-based medicine. In response, the tobacco industry engineered a campaign of scientific disinformation seeking to delay, disrupt, and suppress these studies. Using a massive archive of previously secret documents, historian Allan Brandt shows how the industry pioneered these campaigns, particularly using special interest lobbying and largesse to elude regulation. But even as the cultural dominance of the cigarette has waned and consumption has fallen dramatically in the U.S., Big Tobacco remains securely positioned to expand into new global markets. The implications for the future are vast: 100 million people died of smoking-related diseases in the 20th century; in the next 100 years, we expect 1 billion deaths worldwide. ReviewsDetailed, illuminating book...But if the companies sometimes seemed to be getting away with murder in the courts, they don’t get away with it in Brandt’s book, which painstakingly documents this depressing sideshow in American corporate history.
Brandt, a medical historian, has constructed an enthralling social, commercial, and medical account of the rise and fall of cigarettes in the United States in the twentieth century. The tobacco companies have survived virtually everything their opponents have thrown at them...Brandt's is the first full and convincing explanation of how they pulled it off. I defy anyone to read the middle chapters of The Cigarette Century
and not come away [outraged]. ...Highly readable, exhaustively researched...fascinating (and shocking)...
Grist for an anti-smoking campaigner’s mill, and testimony to the banality of evil.
...The revelations come thick and fast ... distills a devastating and queasily entertaining recent history of our biggest man-made killer ... ...an exhaustive and highly entertaining take on the smoke in "The Cigarette Century" (Basic Books, $36, or the cost of five packs of Camels). ...and Brandt makes it maddeningly clear that the industry knew that its products might be dangerous from about 1950 on, but did a band-up job of obfuscating the risks. At 600 pages, it’s an academically rigorous indictment of the industry, its deceptive practices and its devastating impact on public health. But the book is also, in parts, surprisingly fun. Selling TerritoryWorld Excluding UK & Commonwealth |
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