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Cigarettes Are Sublime
Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good. With its origins in the author’s urgent desire to stop smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime offers a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. Richard Klein focuses on the dark beauty, negative pleasures, and exacting benefits attached to tobacco use and to cigarettes in particular
...more
Paperback, 232 pages
Published
January 20th 1995
by Duke University Press Books
(first published November 23rd 1993)
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Community Reviews
(showing 1-30)
I thought this book was amazing. It's literary criticism, film criticism, philosophy, text deconstruction, and an elegy to cigarettes all in just over 200 pages. This is the kind of stuff that Brendan calls "grad school trash," but that I adore.
According to Klein (who wrote this book to help him quit smoking), cigarettes are sublime in the Kantian sense of sublimity: beautiful, but counter-purposive. We all know that the cool kids smoke and Klein makes smoking seem a great deal more appealing t ...more
According to Klein (who wrote this book to help him quit smoking), cigarettes are sublime in the Kantian sense of sublimity: beautiful, but counter-purposive. We all know that the cool kids smoke and Klein makes smoking seem a great deal more appealing t ...more
Sublime, indeed.
This book, inspired by Klein's urgent (and successful) desire to quit smoking, takes a deeply fascinating look at cigarettes, clarifying what they are, their social and artistic functions, and their appeal. Once someone fully understands cigarettes, and why one should not simplistically vilify them, one may be able to get over them and fill that void with something else. But this is not a 'quit smoking' book; it is a fascinating study of one of the most remarkable and important c ...more
This book, inspired by Klein's urgent (and successful) desire to quit smoking, takes a deeply fascinating look at cigarettes, clarifying what they are, their social and artistic functions, and their appeal. Once someone fully understands cigarettes, and why one should not simplistically vilify them, one may be able to get over them and fill that void with something else. But this is not a 'quit smoking' book; it is a fascinating study of one of the most remarkable and important c ...more
This fucking book. God do I miss cigarettes.
Jun 09, 2007
nicebutnubbly
rated it
liked it
Recommends it for:
smokers, ex-smokers
Shelves:
non-fiction
Klein, who is a French professor, wrote this books while quitting smoking, as a love song and farewell to cigarettes. As one might expect, it is less a sociological analysis (though since he pioneered the topic, several of those have come out, and I have them on my shelves waiting to be read) and more of a philosophical musing. What stuck with me from this one is the idea that we smoke first because it is addictive, but secondly because it is deadly, that each cigarette is a fuck you to death, a
...more
Jan 04, 2008
Megan
marked it as to-read
Recommends it for:
People trying to quit smoking
Recommended to Megan by:
Professor Goodson
Shelves:
art,
essays,
philosophy,
popular-culture,
criticism,
existentialism,
social-theory,
history,
non-fiction,
own
I read some of this in a college lit crit class but have always wanted to spend the time to read the entire book.
The premise is that Klein analyzed the famous quitting-smoking novel, Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, and concluded that the anti-smoking message in that book and in the modern world in general were linked to a modern fixation with being healthy. Svevo's book discussed that living itself was a sort of illness that could only be cured by death, and that taken in that light cigaret ...more
The premise is that Klein analyzed the famous quitting-smoking novel, Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, and concluded that the anti-smoking message in that book and in the modern world in general were linked to a modern fixation with being healthy. Svevo's book discussed that living itself was a sort of illness that could only be cured by death, and that taken in that light cigaret ...more
"The cigarette is a prayer for our times"
A cultural history of the Cigarette, written by someone trying to give them up.
Interesting note: I was surprised at how politically important Casablanca was to success in the Second World War.
I was also surprised to find that in contrast to our current efforts to remove smoking from public life, that smoking was an actively encouraged past-time, and a patriotic one during all our wars and revolutions. That moreover, it's always been the accessory of the s ...more
A cultural history of the Cigarette, written by someone trying to give them up.
Interesting note: I was surprised at how politically important Casablanca was to success in the Second World War.
I was also surprised to find that in contrast to our current efforts to remove smoking from public life, that smoking was an actively encouraged past-time, and a patriotic one during all our wars and revolutions. That moreover, it's always been the accessory of the s ...more
This is the best book I've ever found on the subject of cigarettes, their history, and on quitting them if you're addicted. It's not a how-to, it's an expose filled with rich history, and social commentary and you relate (I did anyway) to Mr. Klein. I've had the hardcover of this book for over 20 years but when I rediscovered it after as many years smoking while trying to quit, it really helped me!
Can we look at the cigarette as nothing but a stick of dynamite gently accelerating our dates of death? How do we reconcile the cigarette's undeniable romanticism with its enormous capacity to kill? To Richard Klein, we can't. The smoker and the antismoker are yin and yang. One can't exist without the other.
This "book" was hard work.
It is supposed to be a contemplation on the art of smoking.... in fact, it was just a self indulgent, poorly written, scantily researched, poorly constructed, rather boring essay about people that have smoked.
Something the author knocked up between fags possibly? Sadly, the writing on the fag packet itself will probably be a more interesting read for most people.
It is supposed to be a contemplation on the art of smoking.... in fact, it was just a self indulgent, poorly written, scantily researched, poorly constructed, rather boring essay about people that have smoked.
Something the author knocked up between fags possibly? Sadly, the writing on the fag packet itself will probably be a more interesting read for most people.
I read this for informative and research reasons.Indeed it was very informative,it covered art,politics,history it gave some honest and unconvetional opinions on health and addiction.I rated it three stars because it was boring at times but for the price I paid it's a useful book.
Sep 01, 2009
Mike Ehlers
marked it as to-read
Trying to figure out why people continue to smoke.
This is actually a fascinating commentary on modernity, hyperbolically written and fun throughout.
Best book I've read about what smoking really is, what it means.
How to carry on smoking despite the task that Richard set himself in writing the novel, but it truly is an ode to cigarettes, and absolutely lovingly drawn (excuse the pun) out.
Sublime as in "a moment of relief from life's shitty monotony."
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