Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry: its awesome and ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society's most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into America's most profitable consumer product: its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldes, and their battling successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman: its generations of entrepreneurial geniuses: its cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle: its deft political power plays: its relentless, often devious attacks on antismoking forces in science, public health, and government. And there is the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all warnings and buy, buy, buy.

Here is how the leaf that was the New World's most passionately devoured gift to the Old grew into humankind's most dangerous consumer product, employing whole rural populations, fattening tax revenues, and spawning a ring of fiercely competitive corporate superpowers; how tobacco's peerless public-relations spinners, applied their techniques to becloud the overwhelming evidence of the cigarette's lethal and addictive nature; and finally, at this historic moment in the cigarette wars, how both the besieged industry and the aroused public-health forces nationwide are maneuvering as the battle rages ever more ferociously.