Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris.

• Author: Pringle, Peter

After toiling for seven years, Richard Kluger has written an encyclopedic, authoritative history of the tobacco companies. Those who admired the journalist-turned-social historian's superb account of Brown v. Board of Education in Simple Justice, will revere the commanding sweep of this work, the most illuminating book so far on the folly and greed of the tobacco lords.

This project began with an extraordinary invitation from the secretive Philip Morris company, the nation's largest tobacco enterprise, to interview its senior executives. Thanks to this entree, Kluger brings a novel ingredient to his account; no other author has gained such access.

Philip Morris executives yearned to be properly understood and they evidently had faith that the unpremeditated approach carefully constructed by Kluger would not jeopardize their fortunes. So persistent was the author in suspending moral judgement that the anti-smoking activists he encountered during his research thought he had "gone native" after sessions in the Philip Morris boardroom.

The faith put in Kluger by the tobacco executives was, in the end, not misplaced. He presents evidence that "strongly suggests [the companies] well understood the health charges against them and had by utterance and action tried for forty years to blind the public to the severity of the risks of smoking," but the author believes the companies should not be "dealt with unkindly," or punished in a way that would stem the industry's flow of riches. In his view, the fault lies with a failure to regulate a product that is clearly harmful and addictive. Cigarette makers, in his view, have behaved merely according to commercial expediency--finding the best way to make the most profit under the law. As for the tobacco chiefs' statements before Congress that they believed nicotine was not addictive--that is "slippery conduct," according to Kluger, not perjury.

There is little to be gained, perhaps nothing, Kluger argues, by "hand-wringing" and "demonizing" and pursuing the tobacco companies through the courts--because they always win and will probably survive the current, and most challenging, spate of class actions and state lawsuits. Society must now "dance with the devil" in constructing a compromise, he says.

Kluger's appeasing solution--laid out in the book and in a recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine--is a blanket, and retroactive, exemption by Congress from all personal injury claims by smokers...