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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

4.2 out of 5 stars 47

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Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry's  ironicsuccess in developing the cigarette, modern society's most widespreadinstrument of self-destruction, into the nation's most profitableconsumer product.  Starting with its energized, work-obsessed royalfamilies, the Dukes and the Reynoldses, and their embattled successorslike the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman, the book vividly portrays the cigarrettemakers generationsof entrepreneurial geniuses.  Their problematic achievement was based on cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle, deft political powerplays, and a relentless, often devious attack on antismoking forces inscience, public health, and government.  Enabling the whole process tounfold was the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared atany cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American publichabituated to ignore all health warnings and buy, buy, buy.

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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A great battleship of a book - formidable, majestic...armed with anabundance of revealing information, guided with discerning literaryskill.... Mr. Kluger invites one to admire these moguls of tobacco theway one appreciates, say, Lenin - as brilliant strategists andresourceful technicians ...single-minded in their determination to satisfy [a mass want] and heedless of the human cost of their profit making." A behind-the-scenes history of an industry "whose structure, power, andgrowing vulnerability are so richly illuminated by this monumental andtimely book."

-- 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

No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail.

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

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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 47

About the author

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Richard Kluger
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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.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
47 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2016
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.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2013
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.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2024
This book tells about the things added to tobacco to give it flavor. I hope to grow it.
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2015
Very thorough and well-written book. I can't imagine a better book on the cigarette industry. The only deficiency is that it is not completely up to date.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2007
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.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2015
Mr Kluger's tome contains fascinating insight into the nuts and bolts and agendas of entiites involved with 19th and 20th C. E. history of combusted cigarettes, cigars and experimentals. Not all of it can be taken at face value, but it does cover a huge amount of information over the many aspects of this staple of the US economy.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2009
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.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 1997
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
13 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Ryan Williams
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2016
Hugely interesting