All great writers in history were smokers but now smoking had been banned globally effective New Year’s Day 2009. The Act of Cessation was launched during the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations with dire implications because of the rampant rumor of Obama being a closet-smoker. This book is a parody about a brilliant writer who lives two lives – one in the media industry interfacing with celebrities, a number of whom make cameo appearances. The other is his secret life as the last smoker on earth. Facilitated by nicotine stimulation, the protagonist is on a mission to return literature to society as a closet-smoker, writing the great American novel in his surreptitious sojourns to the underground. If apprehended by the anti-tobacco police he will be incarcerated in a place called the Midnight Express and never heard from again.
A collection of offbeat short stories from an acclaimed Japanese author explores the folly of human desire in a world in which the fantastic and the mundane collide to throw the lives of ordinary men and women into disarray.
Historians and scientists a few millennia from now are likely to see tobacco as one of the major bafflements of our time, suggests Janet Brigham. Why do we smoke so much, even when we know that tobacco kills more than a million of us a year? Two decades ago, smoking was on the decline in the United States. Now the decline has flattened, and smoking appears to be increasing, most ominously among young people. Cigar smoking is on the rise. Data from a generation of young smokers indicate that many of them want to quit but have no access to effective treatment. Dying to Quit features the real-life smoking day of a young woman who plans to quitâ€"again. Her comments take readers inside her love/hate relationship with tobacco. In everyday language, the book reveals the complex psychological and scientific issues behind the news headlines about tobacco regulations, lawsuits and settlements, and breaking scientific news. What is addiction? Is there such a thing as an addictive personality? What does nicotine do to the body? How does it affect the brain? Why do people stand in subzero temperatures outside office buildings to smoke cigarettes? What is the impact of carefully crafted advertisements and marketing strategies? Why do people who are depressed tend to smoke more? What is the biology behind these common links? These and many fundamental questions are explored drawing on the latest findings from the world's best addictions laboratories. Want to quit? Brigham takes us shopping in the marketplace of gizmos and gadgets designed to help people stop smoking, from wristwatch-like monitors to the lettuce cigarette. She presents the bad news and the not-so-bad news about smoking cessation, including the truth about withdrawal symptoms and weight gain. And she summarizes authoritative findings and recommendations about what actually works in quitting smoking. By training a behavioral scientistâ€"by gift a writing talentâ€"Brigham helps readers understand what people feel when they use tobacco or when they quit. At a time when tobacco smoke has filled nearly every corner of the earth and public confusion grows amid strident claims and counterclaims in the media, Dying to Quit clears the air with dispassion toward facts and compassion toward smokers. This book invites readers on a fascinating journey through the world of tobacco use and points the way toward help for smokers who want to quit. Janet Brigham, Ph.D., is a research psychologist with SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where she studies tobacco use. A former journalist and editor, she has conducted substance use research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the University of Pittsburgh
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.
In Circles is the follow-up publication to the author’s widely-acclaimed parody novel, The Last Smoker on Earth and the End of Literature [Friesen Press, Vancouver, 2021]. The poems were composed in 40 countries around the world. The collection is occasionally profound, sometimes mischievous, but essentially humorous. The author makes a thematic distinction between poems that are obviously whimsical (Nosepicker, Mortal); the misery of despondency (Loner and a bar-room mirror); a ‘recitation-tribute’ to his father growing-up in the West of Ireland (Primrose Hill) and the few such as Paroxysm of Fear that are deeply intense, personal and penetrating. He felt it necessary to include these calamitous images in the vital reality and vulnerability of our times - in a sobriety of our concomitant need for diversion. In Circles is as much a series of standalone vignettes as it is a book of poems. It makes free use of wordplay, euphemism and sound while experimenting with the illustrative (eyecatching) effects of using icons to coax a vivid curiosity in an enlivening of the genre.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Nicotiana; Or, The Smoker's and Snuff-Taker's Companion" by Henry James Meller. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
People have always smoked, and they probably always will. Every culture in recorded history has smoked something, whether for pleasure or relief, whether as part of an elaborate religious ritual or merely to strike a pose. This is the first truly comprehensive history of smoking, describinbg all of its forms, practices, paraphernalia and materials, in cultures, locations and times throughout the world.
