Article: Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Victory of Philip Morris. (book reviews)

One would have to have a heart of stone," Oscar Wilde said, "to read Dickens' account of the death of Little Nell without bursting out laughing." The story of tobacco's evolution into a $50 billion-a-year industry, driven largely by inane advertising pitches that would insult the intelligence of an aardvark, should be even funnier than the death of Little Nell.

How a fourth of the human race became addicted to a noxious weed devoid of narcotic or hallucinogenic properties, amid almost universal awareness of its lethal properties, is a saga of mass cognitive dissonance that cries out for the macabre wit of a Wilde, Dorothy Parker or H.L. Mencken - someone with a sense ...

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