Firebrand
A Tobacco Lawyer's Journey
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"You’ll inhale this tell-all book about the tobacco industry and never look at a No Smoking sign the same way again!"
—Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
Mad Men meets Bad Blood in this addictive, behind-the-scenes globe-trotting narrative of moral ambiguity, law, public policy, and big tobacco.
“Given everything the lawyer knew up to that point about smoking, as far as he could tell, cigarettes shouldn’t even have been available as a mass market product...”
It’s the start of the new millennium and a young lawyer is recruited to work for an unnamed multinational company. It isn’t until his second interview that the product the company produces is revealed to him: cigarettes. Possibly the most controversial consumer product in human history: seductive, addictive, and deadly—yet completely legal. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to help successfully market cigarettes in dozens of countries.
Firebrand ventures into the heart of the tobacco industry and the icy paradoxes of capitalism, each chapter a counterintuitive lesson on how cigarette companies—the target of increasingly intense anti-smoking campaigns and government regulations, including the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement—continue to pivot and thrive in the 21st century, inhaling profits from their one billion smokers worldwide.
As Mad Men did for the alcohol-fueled, oversexed, corrupt world of New York advertising, Firebrand does for the even more despised world of big tobacco, in an addictive, behind-the-scenes piece of storytelling. The lawyer’s work takes him from manufacturing factories to hocking “sticks” at UK corner store counters; from tacky resorts in Spain and pirate city-states to luxury hotels and Grand Prix events across European and Asian cities. A contemporary tale of our ambiguous times, told with character-based drive and dry humour, Firebrand is a grand tour of the compelling paradoxes of globalization and corporate culture, shrink-wrapped in an engrossing narrative of a morally dubious yet completely legal enterprise.
“This is storytelling at its best. Wry observation, compelling narrative, fascinating characters, page-turning writing, and an age-old question driving it all...”
—Joel Bakan, author of The New Corporation: How ‘Good’ Corporations are Bad for Democracy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How has the tobacco industry "managed to survive decades of intense and sustained assault by the medical and scientific establishment, and from governments around the world"? In this entertaining and occasionally enraging investigation, journalist Knelman (Hot Art) seeks to answer that question through the story of a lawyer who spent a decade representing an unnamed multinational tobacco firm. The anonymous lawyer was recruited from an entertainment law office to work on the company's "international brand protection," sports sponsorships, and U.K. compliance issues. His experiences shed light on the industry's sleek yet seedy corporate culture (after a tour of the company's factory in Ireland, the lawyer, who had a fiancée, was advised to get an "Irish girlfriend" if he was going to make regular visits to the country); the challenge of meeting different health, safety, and advertising regulations around the world; the competition from Chinese counterfeiters; and the moral compromises necessary to work in an industry that was responsible for countless deaths. Throughout, Knelman fills in the gaps in the lawyer's firsthand testimony with concise histories of tobacco cultivation and changing attitudes toward cigarettes since the 1964 U.S. surgeon general's report linking tobacco consumption to cancer and other illnesses, as well as his own experiences as a longtime smoker. Packed with colorful insider details and nuanced analysis, this is a stimulating tell-all.
