In this smoke-filled room of a book, full of secrets and closed files, medical historian and expert witness Brandt reveals just what Big Tobacco has wrought in the last 125 years.
Mass production requires mass consumption. So when the Bonsack machine came along in 1882, future tycoon James Duke, blessed with “a capacious, even global vision for his industry” and able to roll out 100,000 cigarettes a day, came to the realization that the things would have to supplant chewing tobacco, pipes and cigars in order to earn their keep. How to do so? From the start, writes Brandt, Duke pressed an aggressive program combining innovations in technology, advertising and marketing. His Tobacco Trust, though soon broken up by federal regulators, was successful well beyond Duke’s plans, in part through the accident of changing cultural norms, in part because of deliberate recruitment of women and children as smokers. As Brandt relates, the major producers benefited, too, from conflict and empire; during World War I, General Pershing said, “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco, as much as bullets.” The manly accessory became necessity for the conscious hipster, thanks to skillful product placement and the insistence of Big Tobacco that cigarette-smoking was not only good for the image but even good for the body. Brandt, an able archivist, cites internal documents showing that the tobacco industry has long been aware of the deleterious effects of smoking—and that it has blocked proposals to produce safer goods, if such were possible, through “legal counsel eager to avoid tacit public admission of the existing product’s dangers.” Whereas in mid-century, about half of Americans smoked, today fewer than a fourth do. Still, warns Brandt, an important expert witness in the RICO trial of 2003, Big Tobacco remains influential—in part, he adds, thanks to “Bush appointees at the Department of Justice.”
Grist for an anti-smoking campaigner’s mill, and testimony to the banality of evil.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-465-07047-7
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | BUSINESS | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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