Ashes to Ashes
by Richard Kluger
Summary
Richard Kluger traces the American cigarette industry across roughly a century, from tobacco's transformation into a mass produced consumer product in the late nineteenth century through the mounting scientific evidence of its harm and the industry's long, coordinated effort to keep selling cigarettes anyway. The book follows the industry broadly rather than a single company, though Kluger gives particular attention to Philip Morris and how it grew, even as public health warnings accumulated, into the dominant cigarette maker in the country, a rise Kluger presents as a case study in how a legal, immensely profitable business can keep expanding against a steady tide of evidence that its product kills people.
Kluger writes with the same close, document based method he brought to his earlier history of school desegregation, Simple Justice, treating the tobacco industry's decades of public relations, scientific disinformation and legal maneuvering as a story that can be reconstructed in detail from company records, court testimony and public health research rather than summarized in outline. The book covers the growing body of medical research linking smoking to cancer and heart disease, the industry's public response to that research, and the slow, uneven rise of government regulation and public awareness across the century the book surveys.
At well over seven hundred pages, the book asks patience of its reader in exchange for a genuinely thorough account of an industry most readers know mainly through its advertising and its later legal reckonings. It suits a reader interested in corporate and public health history told through primary documentation rather than a shorter journalistic account, though the sheer scope of the book's century long timeline means individual episodes sometimes move quickly. Its later chapters reach the 1994 congressional hearings at which the heads of the major tobacco companies swore under oath that they did not believe nicotine was addictive, the moment the industry's long public denial finally met the documentary record Kluger had spent the book assembling.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Kluger the 1997 award for general nonfiction for a book Alfred A. Knopf had published the previous year. That year's other finalists were Samuel G. Freedman's The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond and Cynthia Ozick's Fame and Folly.
Kluger had already built a career moving between journalism and publishing before turning to book length history full time, writing for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post and serving as the last literary editor of The New York Herald Tribune before holding executive posts at Simon and Schuster and Atheneum. His earlier book Simple Justice, a history of the Brown versus Board of Education school desegregation case, established the same document heavy method he later brought to the tobacco industry's history in this book.