Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds
us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or
worse.
-- New York Times Book Review
An
impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework…A well-told story. Milov
has an eye for detail.
-- Wall Street
Journal
Milov offers insights into the way tobacco
companies and their lobbyists exploited America’s federal system to slow down and
weaken efforts to cut cigarette use despite growing evidence of the harm it
causes…If you are looking for a case study in how regulation and politics shape the
US consumer market, The Cigarette more than meets the
bill.
-- Financial Times
A nuanced and
ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses
of American capitalism. The Cigarette looks beyond individual
consumers and their choices and aims its penetrating gaze straight at the larger
phenomena shaping all of our lives: the exigencies of war, the rise of organized
interest groups, the fall of government regulators, and the immense, unseen
influence of big business.
-- Scott W. Stern New
Republic
If you want to know what the smoke-filled
rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read…Many readers
will find Milov’s treatment of the anti-smoking movement most relevant for
understanding political struggles today.
-- Los Angeles Review of
Books
The story of smoking in the United States is
usually presented as a struggle between heroic scientists and activists on the one
hand, fighting to get the truth out to the public, and mendacious tobacco industry
executives on the other, manipulating members of Congress… Milov provides a more
interesting and complicated account.
-- Jackson Lears London Review of
Books
Milov manages to bring fresh insight into how
the industry’s power hooked government treasuries, the advertising business and
scientists for hire, to trump public health for so long…What Milov adds is a nuanced
account of the interplay between corporate machinations and government support for
the industry from the 1930s until very recently.
--
Nature
Cigarettes were widely considered gross and
disreputable at the beginning of the 20th century; by the end, they were on their
way out of widespread public acceptability once more. In between, they were
ubiquitous. The politics of that arc are the subject of [this] fascinating new work
of history.
-- Jezebel
Whether you had
thoughts on Stranger Things’ smoking scenes or just got back from
your Juul break, read Milov’s book about the history of the cigarette…If the movie
Yesterday questioned a world without cigarettes (and The
Beatles), this book will make you realize just how different a world that would have
been.
-- Elena Nicolaou Refinery29
Deftly
connects the rise in organized opponents to smoking to food safety, car safety and
other consumer rights movements of the 20th century.
--
Smithsonian
Groundbreaking…Milov intricately unpacks
the workings of the tobacco industry in its interactions with farmers, laborers and
social movements, a hitherto underexplored area in the history of tobacco in
America…Shows us the ubiquity of tobacco in American society, and its central place
in the arc of American political and social consciousness.
-- Adhip Amin
LSE Review of Books
Mixes big-picture academic
theory with fascinating, specific details to illuminate the rise and fall of tobacco
production…A fine history.
-- Kirkus
Reviews
Milov provides a thoughtful and penetrating
analysis of both the tobacco industry and its relationship to
government.
-- Library Journal (starred
review)
A revisionist history of tobacco that, at
its core, is an indication of the power of civic activism…A fascinating book on a
quintessential American product…Above all, this is an important book on the politics
and power of citizen activism against industry doubt-mongering and government
regulation that worked against citizens’ best interests.
-- Jaipreet Virdi
Nursing Clio
[An] intriguing history of the American
cigarette.
-- Talha Khan Burki The
Lancet
Breathtaking…Weaves together legal,
political, and economic history in a manner that calls for a revaluation of the
dimensions of twentieth-century liberalism and the nature of its decline. The book
is a compelling exercise in historical synecdoche: its subject is the political
history of the cigarette, but its story is that of the twentieth-century American
state…Milov recounts this fascinating history with lucid prose and narrative
verve.
-- Reuel Schiller Jotwell
Sarah
Milov’s The Cigarette offers critical new insights into the
relationship of American politics to the tobacco industry as it grew by leaps and
bounds through the twentieth century. Deeply researched and lucidly argued, this
book is essential reading as new electronic cigarettes test historical approaches
for regulating the massive harms of smoking.
-- Allan Brandt, author of
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the
Product That Defined America
The America
of ‘no smoking in public places’ didn’t just happen. With deep, careful research,
Milov reveals its long, fascinating history as a high-stakes game with contesting
actors. And her story is even bigger than cigarettes; the battle over smoking takes
us to all the hot spots of the nation’s twentieth-century political economy.
The Cigarette is an impressive achievement.
-- Lizabeth
Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in
Postwar America
The
Cigarette is a subtle, well-researched story whose findings speak in fresh
and often surprising ways to central tensions of twentieth-century politics. With a
fine sense of irony, Milov reveals how leading advocates of ‘free enterprise’
depended on tax-funded price supports and quotas that benefited big white growers. A
marvelous contribution to American business and political history.
-- Nancy
MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right’s Stealth Plan for America
By
bringing together the histories of not only tobacco companies, but also farmers,
state officials, smokers, and nonsmokers, Milov provides a new way to understand
American political economy and its history. A brilliant and original
book.
-- Jonathan Levy, author of Freaks of
Fortune
The Cigarette
is a compelling and eye-opening book. But it is not what you might expect. Historian
Sarah Milov doesn’t retrace the familiar story of Big Tobacco and its back room
dealing and deceit. Sure, that stuff is here, but this book is bigger and bolder.
Based on exhaustive research, it shows how the cigarette—both as a product and an
idea—was central to the building and tearing down of American political institutions
and legal thinking in the twentieth century. This book recounts how domestic and
foreign policy representatives encouraged people to smoke at home and abroad, how
tobacco farmers gave shape to fundamental New Deal notions of statecraft, how
nonsmokers emerged as a powerful voice and remade ideas of citizenship and public
space, and really, how you can’t understand the American past without understanding
the role of the cigarette in it. As Milov guides readers through this exciting and
often unexpected history, she introduces them to an amazing cast of characters—from
denim-clad North Carolina farmers and the bow-tie wearing C. Everett Koop to Donna
Shimp, the crusading New Jersey office worker who zeroed in on the cost factors of
smoking and brought the very first lawsuit by an employee against an employer’s
smoking policies. This is a history of politics and big ideas and changes that still
has people in it. Pulling all of this together into one book is a testament to
Milov’s storytelling skills and powerful historical imagination.
-- Bryant
Simon, author of Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from
Starbucks
Adds much to understanding the
role cigarettes played in US history over the last century.
--
Choice
A brilliant and beautiful book about a dark
and smoky chapter in American history…A masterful book penned by a talented
historian. Milov takes a story we think we know and shows how messy the politics of
anti-smoking really was in the United States.
-- Bart Elmore Journal of
Arizona History
