Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

Iain Gately's Tobacco is a sweeping cultural history of the world's most prevalent addiction, and it's probably the best book ever written on its subject. Gately begins in pre-Columbian America, where the natives made tobacco "their most popular gift to the rest of humanity," and continues through all the cantankerous smoking litigation of the 1990s. The story touches on just about every subject imaginable: tobacco in literature, the movies, and society. It would be wrong to call Gately an advocate of smoking, but he clearly takes pleasure, for example, in noting that Hitler's Nazis launched one of history's most vigorous anti-smoking initiatives. The book is full of delicious trivia: Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries smoked, but there's no evidence that the Bard himself did, and none of his plays make any mention of smoking; he "kept his writing a smoke-free zone." Nevertheless, reports Gately with a smirk, there is "archaeological evidence proving that smoking was going on around the Shakespeare household in Stratford-upon-Avon during his life." Smoking aficionados won't want to miss Tobacco, and it's a much healthier gift for them than a box of cigars. --John Miller