What a curious, ambitious book! When I think of titles that will get readers hooked on Russia, this is what I envision. Smoking Under the Tsars is sprawling, drawing cultural anthropology, history, pubpol, and medicine (plus a little journalism) under the wing of RAS.
(Russia Reviewed) Tricia Starks' book is well-written and lavishly illustrated and is an important contribution to the understanding of the manufacture, production, and role that tobacco had in late imperial and in the Revolutionary Russia. Particularly noteworthy is the level of detail that the author has provided on all these topics. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in any aspect of smoking or the tobacco industry in Russia during the periods discussed.
(International Journal of Russian Studies) The history of tobacco smoking and addiction described in Tricia Starks's lively new book Smoking Under the Tsars underscores how deeply ingrained the habit is in Russian history and culture and the difficulty the contemporary Russian state faces in trying to persuade more people to quit.... Fascinating.
(American Journal of Public Health) Starks succeeds in cohesively examining an unconventional topic that will interest a wide audience interested in histories of consumer culture, the senses, women, medicine, and the public sphere before 1917.
(Choice) [Smoking under the Tsars] offers readers a thick anthropological account of complex socialities created and maintained with a cigarette puff.
(Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences) Should be on all graduate students' reading lists and, given their accessible and jargon-free writing styles, could easily be integrated in the undergraduate curriculum.
(Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History) Starks is successful in inviting the reader to reconsider tobacco consumption as a form of national project during the late imperial period. Of interest to scholars of public health, gender, and marketing as well as historians, it is well worthy of a wide readership and an important addition to our understanding of the late imperial period.
(The Russian Review) Starks carefully reviews advertisements, archival documents, maps, and individual narratives to generate an elegant and thorough account of the social life of smoking in prerevolutionary Russia.
(Journal of the History of Medicine) Starks has put together a masterful monograph that weaves together the political, economic, social, and cultural history of smoking in Russia—no small feat. The prose is as vivid and engaging as the stunning, full-color, tsarist-era artwork.
(MUSE) Nicely organized and beautifully illustrated with color reproductions of tobacco and cigarette ads, Smoking covers tobacco use in Russia before 1917 through cultivation of the plant, preparation and use of cigarettes, advertising and consumption, and early arguments pro and con lighting up.
(Journal of Modern History) Smoking under the Tsars is an impressive, multifaceted study of one of the most ubiquitous and controversial commodities in history, the cigarette, in a society famous for heavy smoking. Drawing on medical tracts, Russian literature, economic records, advertising posters and a host of other sources, this richly illustrated volume has something for everyone and connects to a remarkable range of topics through one of the most disposable commodities imaginable. Starks does a fantastic job of balancing the culturally constructed meaning of her subject with its concrete physical realities.
(Canadian-American Slavic Studies) Cigarettes and Soviets makes important contributions to recent work on the global history of tobacco use, along with adding to our understanding of socialist consumption and everyday life. Most delightfully, Starks's book demonstrates a keen understanding of Soviet visual culture in all its unex- pected and paradoxical dimensions, and her beautiful prose evokes the sights and smells of ordinary places in the USSR.
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Starks in her new book does an excellent job of showing how, in the early years of the Soviet Union, health officials tried to get cigarettes banned, only to be steamrollered by the tax-hungry state.
(JMH Review)
