Books, Arts & Manners: Smoke and Mirrors

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger (Knopf, 807 pp., $35)

RICHARD Kluger makes great claims for Ashes to Ashes. It is alleged to show “how cigarette companies have become the most adroit marketers on earth—despite the fact that their product eventually claims the lives of one in four users”; how Philip Morris trounced its rivals, American Tobacco and R. J. Reynolds; how “antismoking activists have stretched the truth about secondhand smoke and smokers’ health-care costs to rouse public resentment”; “how government-mandated warning labels on cigarette packs have given the tobacco companies a thus-far impregnable shield against liability suits”; and much else.

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Digby Anderson

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Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger (Knopf, 807 pp., $35)

RICHARD Kluger makes great claims for Ashes to Ashes. It is alleged to show “how cigarette companies have become the most adroit marketers on earth—despite the fact that their product eventually claims the lives of one in four users”; how Philip Morris trounced its rivals, American Tobacco and R. J. Reynolds; how “antismoking activists have stretched the truth about secondhand smoke and smokers’ health-care costs to rouse public resentment”; “how government-mandated warning labels on cigarette packs have given the tobacco companies a thus-far impregnable shield against liability suits”; and much else.