Description

This text is featured in the Easton Press series 1997 Pulitzer Prize Winners . Published in 1997, bound in handsome Forest Green leather, and SIGNED by the author on the presentation page, this edition, number 325 of 2500, would be a worthy addendum to your collectibles library. Specifics of this series from the Easton Press website: * Fully and tightly bound in genuine leather. * 22kt gold accents deeply inlaid on the "hubbed" spine. * Heavy duty binding boards... . * Superbly printed on acid-neutral paper... . * Sewn pages – not just glued like ordinary books. * ...moiré endpages and a satin-ribbon page marker. * Gilded page ends. ******************************************************************************************************************* "No book before this one has rendered the story of cigarettes -- mankind's most common self-destructive instrument and its most profitable consumer product -- with such sweep and enlivening detail. . . . Here for the first time, in a story full of the complexities and contradictions of human nature, all the strands of the historical process -- financial, social, psychological, medical, political, and legal -- are woven together in a riveting narrative. The key characters are the top corporate executives, public health investigators, and antismoking activists who have clashed ever more stridently as Americans debate whether smoking should be closely regulated as a major health menace. We see tobacco spread rapidly from its aboriginal sources in the New World 500 years ago, as it becomes increasingly viewed by some as sinful and some as alluring, and by government as a windfall source of tax revenue. With the arrival of the cigarette in the late-nineteenth century, smoking changes from a luxury and occasional pastime to an everyday -- to some, indispensable -- habit, aided markedly by the exuberance of the tobacco huskers. . . . We see the tobacco manufacturers come under intensifying assault as a rogue industry for knowingly and callously plying their hazardous wares while insisting that the health charges against them (a) remain unproven, and (b) are universally understood, so smokers indulge at their own risk. Among the eye-opening disclosures here: outrageous pseudo-scientific claims made for cigarettes throughout the '30s and '40s, and the story of how the tobacco industry and the National Cancer Institute spent millions to develop a "safer" cigarette that was never brought to market. Dealing with an emotional subject that has generated more heat than light, this book is a dispassionate tour de force that examines the nature of the companies' culpability, the complicity of society as a whole, and the shaky moral ground claimed by smokers who are now demanding recompense" ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Richard Kluger (born 1934) is an American author who has won a Pulitzer Prize. He focuses his writing chiefly on society, politics and history. He has been a journalist and book publisher. . . . Kluger has been greatly assisted in his nonfiction work by the research skills of his wife, the former Phyllis Schlain, whom he married in South Orange, New Jersey, in March 1957. She attended Douglass College and later graduated from Columbia University, where she majored in art history. Her academic background and a remarkable gift for the fiber arts stood her in good stead when she authored two books of her own, A Needlepoint Gallery of Patterns from the Past (Knopf) and Victorian Designs for Needlepoint (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). . . . Kluger began his career as a journalist, writing for various small newspapers. He later wrote for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Herald Tribune (he was its last literary editor), and magazines, including Forbes. Kluger left journalism to serve as executive editor at Simon & Schuster and editor-in-chief at Atheneum. Afterward, he set up his own publishing house, Charterhouse Books, in partnership with David McKay. McKay acquired Charterhouse in 1973 when Kluger left publishing to become a full-time writer. Kluger has written books of fiction and social history. He is the author of six novels (and two others with his wife, Phyllis). Two of his books were National Book Award finalists, Simple Justice and The Paper (a history of the Herald Tribune). His historical study of the American cigarette business, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. . . . The above text was taken from, respectively, Alfred Knopf Publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia. [Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris. United Kingdom: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.]