The Smoking Book [Hardcover]

Lesley Stern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0226773302 | ISBN-13: 978-0226773308 | Edition: 1

The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air.

Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.

The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her enticing second book (after The Scorsese Connection), South African-born Australian writer Stern explores the rituals, economics and cultural role of smoking, and the exquisite hold tobacco takes over those who enjoy it. If Stern had limited herself to the cultural deconstruction at which she is adept, she might have written a work of cultural criticism But instead she links more than 50 often stunning and always intriguing pieces in a m?lange of genres, including fiction, memoir, history and criticism. Examining smoking from so many vantages, Stern touches on a number of themes. She offers glimpses of the tobacco trade in the former Rhodesia, where among tobacco farmers smoking was obligatory, almost patriotic, and she describes the tobacco sales rooms in Harare, Zimbabwe, where billions of dollars' worth of tobacco are sold annually. To understand tobacco's role in colonialism, she tells of early explorers' and invaders' forays in Africa, and to analyze smoking's cultural role she dips into Barthes and Derrida as well as opera, art and films. But it is desire that concerns the writer mostAfrom the opening paragraph, where smoke both wakens and dampens the appetites of two lovers, to her vivid description of two girls sneaking the ravishing pleasures of contraband Fanta, condensed milk, dried beef and cigarettes. Desire for a smoke and desire for a lost lover intermingle throughout the book, fading into each other until they are almost indistinguishable, and while Stern's writing is never slack, it is most compelling in these passages. Other writersAnotably Richard Klein, in Cigarettes Are SublimeAexplore similar territory, but Stern's mix of fiction and memoir puts a new twist on the discussion of the delicious passion, and equally delicious irony, of smoking in a nonsmoking world. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A literary companion to k.d. lang's compact disc Drag, this sexy and provocative collection of short stories and vignettes revolve around one woman's desire. Stern, a film professor and author of The Scorsese Connection, was born in colonial Zimbabwe but now lives in Australia; she was chosen as a 1999 Village Voice "Writer on the Verge." Smoking is, for her, a metaphor for bodily pleasures; a friend advises her to "carry a package with only one cigarette left" as a way to meet men, and although she gave up smoking for health reasons, she mourns the smell of tobacco and the feel of early morning nicotine hits. Likewise, when she was a smoker, she found that cigarettes bound her to humanityAboth in brief encounters and long-lasting relationships. This book is like a guilty pleasure, an homage to sensual addiction. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.APam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226773302
• ISBN-13: 978-0226773308
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,155,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stern writes a little puff of pleasure, November 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Smoking Book (Hardcover)

Lesley Stern has written a smart, witty literary book about a million things important to us, using hybrid forms: short story, essay, meditation--all of which spin like smoke from the cultural conceit of the cigarette. This is a book about Africa, tobacco, orality, movies, sex, culture, desire and loss. The globe-trotting narrator takes us through the streets of Manhattan, o'er the freeways of LA, into hotel rooms in Tokyo, dinner parties in Scotland, as well as the tobacco farms and factories in Zimbabwe. Great fun--a winner.