Stern was born in Zimbabwe when it was called Rhodesia and tobacco was the country's largest export. She begins her book with a reminiscence of youthful smoking far from parental interference, describing the product packaging, the paraphernalia and context in evocative details that reveal European colonial societies use tobacco just as many native communities do: in rites of passage.

Later Stern returns to her origins to describe primary, secondary even tertiary markets for the product, and the communities that have grown around them. With vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan and South America, the book becomes an international survey showing how tobacco has become as engrained in cultures as it has in individuals. Stern uncovers some clues to the nature of human obsession. Like her subject, her words are woven in a languorous haze that seems to float from the page. The reader is tempted back again and again and again.

"Smoko" is an interesting story of a young girl who begins to smoke while employed in a cigarette factory; how her independence is linked to her newly acquired dependence, using the habit to extend work breaks from the factory floor. It is refreshing to find a story in which the thoughts of labourers are shown to be as layered and complex as those of professionals, business executives, housewives or book reviewers. Here in Canada, archives of the Hamilton Public Library contain a much-reproduced mid 19th century photograph of pre-teen boys smoking on their break outside Tucketts' Tobacco. Their story, one imagines, must have been similar to the one Stern sets in 1968.

What is the appeal of this habit, one that for many is initially so unpleasant they must persevere to take it up? Why do some smokers not want to quit even if they could? Stern shows that it can be a matter of defining identity, like Bogey and Bacall, a desire for distinction made even more attractive by the current legions of fuming correctness.

Like Macfarlane, Stern recognizes that smoking delivers its pleasures, one perhaps as simple as the gratification of craving. A packet that provides such satisfaction twenty times or more in succession (fresh, portable, biodegradable) is a noteworthy bit of technology. Some of tobacco's other pleasures are less direct. In the essay "Instead of a Lobotomy (a cigarette)" Stern presents the context in which Liz Taylor delivered her classic movie line: "Since I was allowed to smoke, I've become a perfect lamb." Imagine!

Under increasing pressure to legislate healthy living and courtesy, governments have helped to create two new groups of criminals: those employed in the tobacco industry and the victims addicted to their products. Attempts to tax smoking out of existence suceeded only in driving the related economies underground. Stern's explorations of the cultural roles tobacco plays in so many societies makes evident how difficult the habit will be to butt out.