EAN 9780375700361

"Ashes to Ashes" is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry: its awesome and ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society's most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into America's most profitable consumer product: its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldes, and their battling successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman: its generations of entrepreneurial geniuses: its cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle: its deft political power plays: its relentless, often devious attacks on antismoking forces in science, public health, and government. And there is the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all warnings and buy, buy, buy.