Customer Reviews

Cigarettes Are Sublime

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I can not remember the last time I read such a well written book. Klein is an amazing wordsmith & this book is a treasure in understanding the lure, beauty, and sublime charms which keep 1.4 billion people in the world smoking every day.

In this iconoclastic gem of a book, Klein manages to provide a wonderful tool to those of us readers who resonate with his wonderful voicing of one giant "in your face" to the new and stultifying "Nanny State". This statement summarizes the message of "Cigarettes are Sublime" !
Usually we who chafe at "Big Brother" telling us how to treat our bodies, resort to arguments like: "Well, I want to have the right to smoke on my balcony at work 'dammit'!" Such protest can sound a bit like an adolescent stamping one's foot. Klein however, in this so well-spun book, with its rich historical analysis spanning many cultures, gives us a unique and powerful tool to use, in voicing our protest.
"Cigarettes are Sublime" manages to capture what is the CULTURALLY EMBEDDED power, and perhaps (if you agree with Klein) what is in fact the VALUE, as means of self-expression, of smoking, as a social symbol and act. As the Editorial reviews note, "vices" in general (drinking, playing poker, smoking, eating gloriously at sumptuous tables with friends) are all very powerful "games" or "props" in that very underappreciated arena of how we humans "play" with each other in private life--what mischief we toy with, what message we project to others about our "attitude"; to death, to sex, to an embrace vs rejection of the message (broadcast daily in ominous bulletins from our media),that our bodies are entities vulnerable and besieged by a barrage of "risks" that we must always vigilantly guard against, at any cost, including sacrifice of our bodies as instruments of pleasure and work. In this light, the puff on a cig is not JUST recklessness, but in fact, can give that same royal pleasure that one gets in reveling on one's roof to catch rays, as others , anxiously monitoring the daily published "cancer index" of the sun, huddle indoors.
Seen from this very often ignored angle of pleasure and play and social intercourse, cigarettes--as are so many of our personal habits and messages to others in our myriad relationships--are a sublime pleasure in the playground of life, the very thing that those who cry for quantity of life, ignoring quality of the play, indeed need heed, if life is what they wish to "celebrate".

The only review was a downer. Whoever "reader" was, didn't really know anything about literature and philosophy. Some basic philosophy knowledge is needed to read this book. Kant (with the sublime theory), Nietzsche and quoted throughtout the book. Great reading. Specially if you smoke.

The only good thing about this book is its contrarian view that cigarettes and other vices have value.

The bad things are numerous. Most of the book is not truly about cigarettes. It is a collection of summaries of an Opera (Carmen), a book (Zeno's Paradox), and a movie (Casablanca) accompanied by a narrow and personal interpretation of these works. The analyses are highly subjective and do not hold water. I doubt if the author believed them. I think he uses them to fill pages because he had a good idea (a paean to cigarettes) but not enough imagination to fill a book on the subject with original ideas.

Smoking-related disease accounts for 3/4 of the deaths in this world. But you probably knew that if you're smoking.

No matter what the assertions, I could care less if people claim to enjoy their freedom and life by smoking. However, it becomes a problem when you infringe on other people's right to live, when your second hand smoke gets into their lungs. That means you deny others the right to life and that, my friends, is slow murder. While in America, we are finally having smoke free areas, most of the rest of the world is still coughing in a second-hand smoke haze and that needs to be changed.