Book Alert / The Smoke of the Gods

The Smoke of the Gods -- A Social History of Tobacco -- by Eric Burns, Temple UP '07, $29, 280 pages, ISBN #1-59213-480-7. Index, select bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

A mere half-century ago, Connecticut celebrated the Tobacco Valley Festival, replete with floats honoring Miss Broadleaf Tobacco or Miss Shade-Grown Cigar (where was Monica Lewinsky when we needed her?). After the parade, we'd head to downtown movie palaces to watch leading men and ladies puff away sexily, even in love scenes. If your state grew tobacco then, you could undoubtedly recount similar memories.

Today, of course, smoking is banned in restaurants and most public places. A few diehards still decry government's intrusion into people's personal habits, but others wonder why it took four decades following the 1964 U.S. Surgeon-General's announcement that smoking is hazardous to our health for these prohibitions to occur.

Eric Burns recounts this transformation in his new book, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Burns, who also wrote a social history of alcohol (which vice will he tackle next?), takes us back to the Mayan civilization of 1,500 years ago, when a clay or stone pipeful of tobacco was considered "a portable altar" and the "most ingenious religious artifact ever invented." Burns traces the use of tobacco for medicinal use and its massive contribution to the economic health of American colonies and the bankrolls of our founding fathers.

Along the way, he recalls paeans to tobacco, such as this overblown one from French missionary Jacques Cartier:

"There is nothing more mysterious or respected than the pipe....Less honor is paid to the crowns and scepters of kings. It seems to be the god of peace and war, the arbiter of life and death. It has to be but carried on one's person, and displayed, to enable one to walk through the midst of enemies, who, in the hottest of fights, lay down their arms when it is shown."

Yet Burns is under no illusions about tobacco's true nature: "It was from the start a commodity that could be adapted to many ends, that could be dressed up in so many convincing disguises that it would take centuries for human beings to strip away all the layers and work their way down to the bitter, uncompromising, and often fatal truth."