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Currently reading two books about Big Tobacco
"Ashes to Ashes America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris" by Richard Kluger
and
"The Cigarette Century The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America" by Allan Brandt
Kluger won the Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction) in 1997 for his book, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. Brandt's book is somewhat later (2007). I find them complementary. Brandt's book is centered more on public health (he's a prof in the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School). Kluger is a journalist, so there's a wealth of detail in his book on the workings of the tobacco trade.
These books hit home for me. My mother, a lifelong smoker, died early of lung cancer in 1998. I was a heavy smoker for 25 years until I finally got that monkey off my back in 1992. I quit then because by that time there was enough grass roots campaigning that my workplace became smoke free.
I found it very interesting to read just how effective the tobacco companies were at leveraging the lavish profits they got from selling a deadly product to prevent any effective public regulation or public education campaign for so long.
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