Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry’s ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society’s most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into the nation’s most profitable consumer product. Starting with its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldses, and their embattled successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman, the book vividly portrays the cigarrettemakers generations of entrepreneurial geniuses. Their problematic achievement was based on cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle, deft political power plays, and a relentless, often devious attack on antismoking forces in science, public health, and government. Enabling the whole process to unfold was the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all health warnings and buy, buy, buy.