Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
Author(s): Robert Proctor
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In "Golden Holocaust", Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
Product Information
"Draws on previously confidential industry documents and Proctor's own experience as the first historian to testify in court about [industry] lies. What lies? How deep into the pleural linings did they go? All the way."--Harper's Magazine "Lays out in head-shaking detail how a handful of companies painstakingly designed, produced, and mass-marketed the most lethal product on the planet."--Mother Jones "[A] monumental and sobering indictment."--Nature "Proctor documents a breadth and depth of the industry's duplicitous actions that is astounding."--Science (Aaas) "A nearly 800-page book that begins as the Bible of the twentieth-century cigarette industry only to end as its millennial counterblaste."--Harper's
Robert N. Proctor is Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University and author of Cancer Wars, Racial Hygiene, and The Nazi War on Cancer He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
General Fields
- :
- : University of California Press
- : University of California Press
- : 1.171
- : February 2012
- : books
Special Fields
- : Robert Proctor
- : Hardback
- : English
- : 752
- : Illustrations