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Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris Paperback – July 29, 1997
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At the center of this epic is thecontinuing drama of the Philip Morris Company and the crafty men at itshelm. The youngest, once smallest entry in the business, it remained an underdog until the marketing brainstorm that transformed the Marlborobrand from little more than a woman's fashion accessory to the ultimateemblem of hairy-chested machismo (and made it America's - and theworld's - #1 smoke). Remarkably, the company's global prosperitymounted steadily even as the news about cigarettes and health grew moredire by the year.
Caught up in the Philip Morris story is the whole sweep of America's cigarette history, from the glory days oframpant hucksterism - when smokers would "walk a mile for a Camel,"Winston tasted "good like a cigarette should," and most of the nationcould decipher "L.S. / M.F.T" - to the bombshell 1964 Surgeon General'sReport that definitively indicted smoking as a killer, to the age of the massive mergers that spawned RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris-KraftGeneral Foods.
Here we learn how the leaf that was the New World's most passionately devoured gift to the Old grew intohumankind's most dangerous consumer product, employing a vast ruralcorps of laborers, fattening tax revenues, and propagating a ring offiercely competitive corporate superpowers; how tobacco's peerlesspublic-relations spinners applied their techniques to becloud theoverwhelming evidence of the cigarette's lethal and addictive nature;and finally, how the besieged industry and the aroused public-healthforces nationwide collided over whether to outlaw the butt habitaltogether or bring it into ever more withering social disdain and under ever tighter government control.
- Print length832 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJuly 29, 1997
- Dimensions5.21 x 1.83 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-109780375700361
- ISBN-13978-0375700361
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Editorial Reviews
Review
-- The New York Times Book Review
"[Ashes to Ashes is] monumental...elegantlywritten.... It will probably be the definitive volume of the subject ofcigarettes in the 20th century."
-- Time Magazine
"Lively, entertaining, awesomely comprehensive.... The quality ofKluger's work astonishes throughout: He actually persuaded many toptobacco executives to talk with him.... Getting the kind of good stuffKluger pulls together is just about miraculous."
-- The Washington Post
From the Inside Flap
Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace.
We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers.
This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and reduced dosages of tar and nicotine.
We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and (b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk.
Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market.
Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense
From the Back Cover
Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace.
We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers.
This free-enterprise success saga grows shadowed, from the middle of this century, as science begins to understand the cigarette's toxicity. Ironically the more detailed and persuasive the findings by medical investigators, the more cigarette makers prosper by seeming to modify their product with filters and reduced dosages of tar and nicotine.
We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and(b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk.
Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market.
Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0375700366
- Publisher : Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (July 29, 1997)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 832 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780375700361
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375700361
- Item Weight : 1.51 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.21 x 1.83 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #205 in Smoking Recovery
- #1,026 in Customs & Traditions Social Sciences
- #1,769 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Richard Kluger is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His latest work, Hamlet’s Children, a historical novel set in German-occupied Denmark during World War 2 and seen through the eyes of an American teenager marooned there with his Danish relatives, will be published by Scarlet Tanager Books on August 15, 2023.
Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he worked for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its review supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.
Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history, Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read have been Members of the Tribe, about mob justice toward an outlander falsely accused of murder, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
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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 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.







