Exhaustively researched, which makes it occasionally exhausting to read. Kluger doesn't help matters with his love of extremely long sentences containing sub-clauses within sub-clauses. Overall, it's a solid history but a good editor could have cut about 400 pages without losing much of substance to the typical reader.
About the book
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…
Ashes to ashes by Richard Kluger, and books like it