Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles

Stanton A Glantz, Edith D Balbach

University of California Press, £12.50, pp 496

ISBN 0 520 22286 5

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Karl von Clausewitz wrote: “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means” (On War). The dictum is faultless, but its application can be problematic. The devil, as always, is in the detail.

Normally, a war's protagonists are well identified, and the combatants carve their bloody path from the political chambers to the battlefield. The usual presumptions do not always apply, however, a point that is forcefully argued in Tobacco War by Stanton Glantz, lead author of The Cigarette Papers and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Edith …