I have read numerous books written on tobacco over the last 100+ years, from the fairly dry (Alfred Dunhill's "The Pipe Book") to the too-trendy-to-be-of-any-use (G. Cabrera Infante's "Holy Smoke"). Burns's "The Smoke of the Gods" is hardly dry; the book can be highly enjoyable to read, especially in the first half. If you're looking for an apparently well-researched history of tobacco -- with a particular focus on its social impact -- from its earliest whiffs, the first half of the book delivers better than perhaps any other book I've read.
But it starts to falter once the timeline reaches the late 1800s. And unless you're interested only in the history of the cigarette -- and, then, only in the health/quitting discussion or the advertising impact -- you might as well stop once the book reaches the 1950s. From that point on, the discussion completely ignores the Cuban tobacco embargo, the entire subject of pipe smoking (including the sudden blossoming of boutique tobacco blenders that began in the 1990s and continues today), and the cigar resurgence that took hold in the 1990s. One could finish this book believing that pipe smoking had vanished and that no one really smokes cigars anymore. In fact, while pipe smoking's numbers are tiny (by comparison with cigarettes), there has, perhaps, never been so many artisan pipe makers (selling pipes in the $250-$1,000+ range) and pipe-tobacco blenders in existence as there are right now. In addition, dedicated cigar bars continue to exist throughout the country, in cities big and small. It actually would have been nice for Burns to consider why those facts are true, what tobacco delivers (besides nicotine addiction, which is largely irrelevant for pipe/cigar smokers) that continues to earn it a place in some people's lives.
I had no expectation that this would be a book by a tobacco consumer. I was not looking for a modern apologia. But it seems that Burns's perspective was completely skewed once the health debate surrounding cigarette smoking entered the picture. I would have appreciated a book that truly cast its eye at the *whole* social picture surrounding the continuing use of tobacco.
Finally, it must also be said that, while Burns begins the story in South America, he is really aiming at a U.S.-based readership; once tobacco makes its way from the Americas to Europe and back again, the rest of the world's tobacco use is almost completely disregarded.
