PositiveLondonThe 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. Eventually truth and health prevail. In The Cigarette: A Political History, Sarah Milov provides a more interesting and complicated account. The rise and fall of the cigarette in the US was, she shows, intertwined with the country’s transition from the associational state created by the New Deal to the stripped-down neoliberal state of our own time. And a major advance in public health was accomplished through the mobilisation of a parsimonious social vision. This wasn’t just a tale of heroes and villains.
Mike Wallace
RaveThe New York Review of BooksEarly-twentieth-century American society was on the verge of a reshuffling of values and power relations in which the rich would come out just fine. And New York City was where that new synthesis would be worked out, in all its messy and contradictory details. Mike Wallace knows this. In fact he knows nearly everything worth knowing about New York during the years leading up to World War I...Wallace packs these and a multitude of other fascinating details into his enormous book, Greater Gotham, which somehow remains astonishingly readable. But he also gets the big picture right—the balance of cultural tensions, the centrifugal exuberance vs. the new forms of power and control … One could not ask for a more thorough or thoughtful guide to the emergence of New York as the Empire City.
