Grist for an anti-smoking campaigner’s mill, and testimony to the banality of evil.
In this smoke-filled room of a book, full of secrets and closed files, medical historian and expert witness Brandt reveals just what Big Tobacco has wrought in the last 125 years.
Mass production requires mass consumption. So when the Bonsack machine came along in 1882, future tycoon James Duke, blessed with “a capacious, even global vision for his industry” and able to roll out 100,000 cigarettes a day, came to the realization that the things would have to supplant chewing tobacco, pipes and cigars in order to earn their keep. How to do so? From the start, writes Brandt, Duke pressed an aggressive program combining innovations in technology, advertising and marketing. His Tobacco Trust, though soon broken up by federal regulators, was successful well beyond Duke’s plans, in part through the accident of changing cultural norms, in part because of deliberate recruitment of women and children as smokers. As Brandt relates, the major producers benefited, too, from conflict and empire; during World War I, General Pershing said, “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco, as much as bullets.” The manly accessory became necessity for the conscious hipster, thanks to skillful product placement and the insistence of Big Tobacco that cigarette-smoking was not only good for the image but even good for the body. Brandt, an able archivist, cites internal documents showing that the tobacco industry has long been aware of the deleterious effects of smoking—and that it has blocked proposals to produce safer goods, if such were possible, through “legal counsel eager to avoid tacit public admission of the existing product’s dangers.” Whereas in mid-century, about half of Americans smoked, today fewer than a fourth do. Still, warns Brandt, an important expert witness in the RICO trial of 2003, Big Tobacco remains influential—in part, he adds, thanks to “Bush appointees at the Department of Justice.”
Grist for an anti-smoking campaigner’s mill, and testimony to the banality of evil.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-465-07047-7
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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