About the book
Nicotine Fiends
America's Tragic Love Affair with a Wicked Weed
A colorful narrative history of smoking in America — from Christopher Columbus's first encounter with tobacco to the e-cigarette era. Told through vivid stories, forgotten advertising campaigns, and the lives of real Americans who lived and died by the cigarette.
The Story of an American Tragedy
For more than one-half century, cigarettes and smoking gradually tightened their deadly grip on the country, making it ever more difficult to escape the allure of the highly addictive tobacco plant. At the peak of the smoking era — from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s — nearly half of all Americans smoked. Doctors smoked. Nurses smoked. Presidents smoked. Soldiers were handed cigarettes by their government. The Flintstones pitched Winston cigarettes. Candy cigarettes taught kids to mimic the habit. And hundreds of thousands died.
Nicotine Fiends tells the full story: how a plant given to Christopher Columbus became the most profitable and deadly consumer product in American history, how the tobacco industry built an empire on addiction and deception, and how ordinary Americans paid the price with their health and their lives.
Richly illustrated with historic photographs, vintage advertisements, and colorful period imagery, this book brings the smoking era to life in vivid, sometimes shocking detail.
“Many screen idols were role models. They were attractive, confident, desirable, manly or sexy, and they were smokers.”
— From Nicotine Fiends
Famous Faces, Tragic Fates
Nicotine Fiends traces the smoking habits of some of America's most beloved public figures — and the health consequences that followed. From Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne to Rod Serrling and Desi Arnaz, the book puts a human face on the epidemic.
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