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Dym. Powszechna historia palenia
"Dym" to pierwsza zrozumiała dla wszystkich historia palenia opisująca wszystkie jej formy, praktyki, parafernalia i materiały z różnych kultur, miejsc i czasów. Ponad 300 ilustracji dokumentuje palaczy i palenie wszelkiego rodzaju substancji, łącznie z tytoniem, aromatyzowanymi papierosami, marihuaną i kokainą. Od palarni opium w wiktoriańskiej Anglii do tytoniu w dawnej Japonii i hollywoodzkich produkcjach, od trawki i heroiny do hawańskich cygar. Szeroki wybór esejów ukazuje palenie zarówno w kulturze wysokiej, jak i popularnej, porusza temat płci i narodowości, sztuki, literatury, aż po reklamę, film i muzykę. "Dym" porusza również mroczną stronę tematu, łącznie z krytyką z punktu widzenia prawa, moralności i medycyny, towarzyszącą produkcji, dystrybucji i konsumpcji używek.
Jest to książka dla każdego, dla ludzi zainteresowanych relacjami między paleniem a sztuką, historią medycyny, reklamą, ekonomią oraz dla kolekcjonerów fajek i miłośników cygar. Zaintryguje zagorzałych palaczy, ale też przeciwników palenia, jak również dużo liczniejszą grupę: wszystkich, którzy próbowali i nie udało się im rzucić palenia.
Jest to książka dla każdego, dla ludzi zainteresowanych relacjami między paleniem a sztuką, historią medycyny, reklamą, ekonomią oraz dla kolekcjonerów fajek i miłośników cygar. Zaintryguje zagorzałych palaczy, ale też przeciwników palenia, jak również dużo liczniejszą grupę: wszystkich, którzy próbowali i nie udało się im rzucić palenia.
406 pages, Hardcover
First published August 15, 2004
2 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
About the author
Sander L. Gilman
124 books39 followersSander L. Gilman is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books. Gilman's focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse.
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September 7, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Addiction-alcohol-smoking-crack
I cannot remember the exact moment when Sander L. Gilman’s Smoke: A Global History of Smoking came into my hands, but I do remember the sense of inevitability that accompanied it. Books about addiction, about the way substances shape history, always seem to draw me as though they carry the residue of the very cravings they describe.
This hefty hardcover, edited by Gilman with his trademark mixture of scholarly breadth and cultural wit, stood on my shelf for some time before I dared to open it properly. The cover itself seemed to whisper promises of smoke curling through centuries, of empires and ashtrays, of pipes and politics, of rituals that begin in fire and end in coughing lungs.
When I did open it, I realised I was stepping into a book that was not a single narrative but a sprawling collection, a chorus of voices gathered from multiple disciplines, each attempting to pin down the phenomenon of smoking — a phenomenon that resists reduction precisely because it is at once habit, addiction, ritual, status symbol, public health crisis, and intimate pleasure.
Gilman has long been one of those figures who understand that cultural history must be told at the crossroads of medicine, art, and anthropology. His earlier works on the body, on madness, and on disease, all reveal a fascination with how societies encode their anxieties in the most ordinary practices. In this book, smoking becomes the object of such scrutiny, and the genius of the volume lies in its insistence that there is no single history of smoking, only a constellation of histories, each inflected by region, by class, by technology, and by politics.
The contributors range across continents and centuries, exploring the indigenous uses of tobacco in the Americas before European contact, the rituals of smoking in Asia, the explosion of cigarette culture in the industrial age, the role of advertising, the war on smoking in the late twentieth century, and even the symbolic meanings of smoke in art and literature. What unites these essays is not agreement but a shared recognition that to speak of smoking is to speak of human society itself, because smoke is both material and metaphor, a substance consumed and a symbol exhaled.
Reading through the book, I was struck by how smoking functions as one of those practices that seems at once intimate and global. On the one hand, there is the solitary smoker, lighting a cigarette at dusk, lost in private contemplation, the curl of smoke as personal as a thought.
On the other hand, there is the massive machinery of tobacco empires, plantations and slave labour; advertising campaigns that span nations; government regulations and public health warnings. Gilman’s volume makes it impossible to ignore this double nature. Smoking is never just a private vice; it is always entangled with structures of power.
The essays on colonial histories of tobacco were particularly revealing in this regard. Tobacco was not merely a crop; it was a commodity that fuelled the Atlantic economy, linking the exploitation of indigenous knowledge with the brutalities of slavery and the voracious appetites of European markets. To inhale smoke, one might say, was to inhale empire.
And yet the book also insists on the multiplicity of meanings. Smoking has been sacred as well as profane. Among indigenous groups, tobacco was often part of ritual, a means of communion with the spiritual world. The colonial encounter stripped it of this context, transforming it into profit and pleasure, but the trace of the sacred never fully disappeared. Even today, in literature and film, smoke retains a quasi-mystical aura, standing for freedom, rebellion, creativity, or the ineffable. One of the pleasures of reading the volume was to see scholars of art history and cultural studies side by side with medical historians, each revealing how the same act of inhalation could be described as a poison or as a prayer, as a death wish or as an aesthetic flourish.
Gilman himself, in his introduction, sets the tone by emphasising the global reach of smoking. He reminds us that smoking has been condemned and celebrated, banned and glamorised, medicalised and eroticised. The contradictions are endless, and the volume delights in dwelling within them.
I was particularly intrigued by the essays that addressed the twentieth century’s cult of the cigarette. Unlike the pipe or the cigar, which often carried connotations of masculinity, power, or leisure, the cigarette democratised smoking, making it fast, cheap, and accessible. But it also made it more addictive, more entwined with industrial production. Here the book’s contributors trace how advertising reshaped desire: women were invited to light up as a gesture of emancipation, soldiers were handed cigarettes as part of their rations, and Hollywood stars blew smoke across black-and-white screens, turning nicotine into glamour. Reading these sections, I could not help but think of my own childhood memories of seeing posters and films where cigarettes were always cool, always defiant, before the anti-smoking campaigns rebranded them as symbols of decay.
The volume does not shy away from the darker side, of course. Public health is a central theme, and several essays address the campaigns against smoking, the epidemiological studies that linked cigarettes to lung cancer, and the legal battles with tobacco companies. What fascinated me was the way these narratives intersected with issues of personal freedom and state control. To ban smoking is never merely a medical measure; it is also a political act, a negotiation between individual choice and collective welfare. Some contributors argue that the demonisation of smokers in late twentieth-century Western culture has created a new kind of stigma, casting the smoker as irresponsible, deviant, and even criminal. Thus, the history of smoking is also a history of shame, of how societies police bodies in the name of health.
One of the things I admire about the book is its refusal to be linear. The histories are layered and sometimes contradictory, and Gilman embraces this. The result is a book that reads more like a kaleidoscope than a straight narrative. At times, this can feel overwhelming — so many voices, so many perspectives, each jostling for attention. But in a way, this multiplicity mirrors the very nature of smoke itself: elusive, shifting, and impossible to contain.
I remember pausing midway through and realising that the act of reading the book was itself like inhaling — drawing in fragments of knowledge, letting them swirl, and then exhaling reflections that were always provisional.
Stylistically, the prose varies depending on the contributor. Some essays are dense with data and statistics on mortality and production, while others are almost lyrical, meditating on the image of smoke in art or the psychology of addiction. Gilman’s editorial hand ensures a basic coherence, but he does not flatten the diversity of voices. This is both a strength and a challenge: the book is not designed to be read in one sitting but to be revisited, dipped into, and smoked like a series of cigarettes rather than swallowed as a meal. I found myself returning to particular essays again and again, especially those that explored the symbolic dimensions of smoke — its role in literature, its presence in modernist art, and its metaphorical weight in psychoanalysis. Freud himself, after all, was inseparable from his cigars, and psychoanalysis is haunted by the smoke of his habit.
There is also a subtle ethical question running through the book: how do we write about smoking without glamorising it, without succumbing to the very seductions that made it so pervasive? Gilman and his contributors walk this tightrope carefully. They acknowledge the pleasures, the aesthetics, even the intimacy of smoking, but they also foreground the costs — the millions of deaths, the corporate manipulations, the environmental damage. The balance is delicate, but it is necessary. History cannot be propaganda, and neither can it be blind nostalgia. To write about smoking is to write about human desire itself, in all its destructive and creative capacities.
Reading Smoke in the twenty-first century, when smoking has been pushed to the margins in many societies, carries its own poignancy. In India, for instance, public smoking bans, health warnings on cigarette packs, and the rise of anti-smoking discourse have transformed the act into something furtive, almost shameful. And yet, on countless street corners, men still gather to share a bidi, women still light cigarettes as a gesture of independence, and hookah lounges flourish among the young. The global history of smoking is far from over; it continues to unfold around us. Gilman’s book helps us see these contemporary practices not as isolated phenomena but as part of a centuries-long story of fire, lungs, and longing.
When I closed the book, I felt both enlightened and unsettled. Enlightened, because I had been given a panoramic view of smoking that stretched across continents and centuries, showing me connections I had never considered. Unsettled, because I realised how deeply smoke is woven into the fabric of human culture, how difficult it is to disentangle the toxic from the poetic. Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson of the book: smoke is both destroyer and companion, both killer and muse. To understand it is to understand something fundamental about ourselves.
And so Smoke: A Global History of Smoking remains on my shelf not as a book I have “finished” but as one I continue to inhale in fragments, as one returns to a ritual both harmful and irresistible. Gilman has edited not just a history of smoking but a history of human vulnerability, our capacity to turn even poison into pleasure, and our tendency to wrap mortality in ritual and meaning.
If smoke dissipates, leaving only traces in the air, then this book is its archive, capturing what would otherwise vanish. It is, in its own way, a memorial to centuries of inhalations and exhalations, a testimony to the paradox that sometimes what kills us is also what binds us together.
I cannot remember the exact moment when Sander L. Gilman’s Smoke: A Global History of Smoking came into my hands, but I do remember the sense of inevitability that accompanied it. Books about addiction, about the way substances shape history, always seem to draw me as though they carry the residue of the very cravings they describe.
This hefty hardcover, edited by Gilman with his trademark mixture of scholarly breadth and cultural wit, stood on my shelf for some time before I dared to open it properly. The cover itself seemed to whisper promises of smoke curling through centuries, of empires and ashtrays, of pipes and politics, of rituals that begin in fire and end in coughing lungs.
When I did open it, I realised I was stepping into a book that was not a single narrative but a sprawling collection, a chorus of voices gathered from multiple disciplines, each attempting to pin down the phenomenon of smoking — a phenomenon that resists reduction precisely because it is at once habit, addiction, ritual, status symbol, public health crisis, and intimate pleasure.
Gilman has long been one of those figures who understand that cultural history must be told at the crossroads of medicine, art, and anthropology. His earlier works on the body, on madness, and on disease, all reveal a fascination with how societies encode their anxieties in the most ordinary practices. In this book, smoking becomes the object of such scrutiny, and the genius of the volume lies in its insistence that there is no single history of smoking, only a constellation of histories, each inflected by region, by class, by technology, and by politics.
The contributors range across continents and centuries, exploring the indigenous uses of tobacco in the Americas before European contact, the rituals of smoking in Asia, the explosion of cigarette culture in the industrial age, the role of advertising, the war on smoking in the late twentieth century, and even the symbolic meanings of smoke in art and literature. What unites these essays is not agreement but a shared recognition that to speak of smoking is to speak of human society itself, because smoke is both material and metaphor, a substance consumed and a symbol exhaled.
Reading through the book, I was struck by how smoking functions as one of those practices that seems at once intimate and global. On the one hand, there is the solitary smoker, lighting a cigarette at dusk, lost in private contemplation, the curl of smoke as personal as a thought.
On the other hand, there is the massive machinery of tobacco empires, plantations and slave labour; advertising campaigns that span nations; government regulations and public health warnings. Gilman’s volume makes it impossible to ignore this double nature. Smoking is never just a private vice; it is always entangled with structures of power.
The essays on colonial histories of tobacco were particularly revealing in this regard. Tobacco was not merely a crop; it was a commodity that fuelled the Atlantic economy, linking the exploitation of indigenous knowledge with the brutalities of slavery and the voracious appetites of European markets. To inhale smoke, one might say, was to inhale empire.
And yet the book also insists on the multiplicity of meanings. Smoking has been sacred as well as profane. Among indigenous groups, tobacco was often part of ritual, a means of communion with the spiritual world. The colonial encounter stripped it of this context, transforming it into profit and pleasure, but the trace of the sacred never fully disappeared. Even today, in literature and film, smoke retains a quasi-mystical aura, standing for freedom, rebellion, creativity, or the ineffable. One of the pleasures of reading the volume was to see scholars of art history and cultural studies side by side with medical historians, each revealing how the same act of inhalation could be described as a poison or as a prayer, as a death wish or as an aesthetic flourish.
Gilman himself, in his introduction, sets the tone by emphasising the global reach of smoking. He reminds us that smoking has been condemned and celebrated, banned and glamorised, medicalised and eroticised. The contradictions are endless, and the volume delights in dwelling within them.
I was particularly intrigued by the essays that addressed the twentieth century’s cult of the cigarette. Unlike the pipe or the cigar, which often carried connotations of masculinity, power, or leisure, the cigarette democratised smoking, making it fast, cheap, and accessible. But it also made it more addictive, more entwined with industrial production. Here the book’s contributors trace how advertising reshaped desire: women were invited to light up as a gesture of emancipation, soldiers were handed cigarettes as part of their rations, and Hollywood stars blew smoke across black-and-white screens, turning nicotine into glamour. Reading these sections, I could not help but think of my own childhood memories of seeing posters and films where cigarettes were always cool, always defiant, before the anti-smoking campaigns rebranded them as symbols of decay.
The volume does not shy away from the darker side, of course. Public health is a central theme, and several essays address the campaigns against smoking, the epidemiological studies that linked cigarettes to lung cancer, and the legal battles with tobacco companies. What fascinated me was the way these narratives intersected with issues of personal freedom and state control. To ban smoking is never merely a medical measure; it is also a political act, a negotiation between individual choice and collective welfare. Some contributors argue that the demonisation of smokers in late twentieth-century Western culture has created a new kind of stigma, casting the smoker as irresponsible, deviant, and even criminal. Thus, the history of smoking is also a history of shame, of how societies police bodies in the name of health.
One of the things I admire about the book is its refusal to be linear. The histories are layered and sometimes contradictory, and Gilman embraces this. The result is a book that reads more like a kaleidoscope than a straight narrative. At times, this can feel overwhelming — so many voices, so many perspectives, each jostling for attention. But in a way, this multiplicity mirrors the very nature of smoke itself: elusive, shifting, and impossible to contain.
I remember pausing midway through and realising that the act of reading the book was itself like inhaling — drawing in fragments of knowledge, letting them swirl, and then exhaling reflections that were always provisional.
Stylistically, the prose varies depending on the contributor. Some essays are dense with data and statistics on mortality and production, while others are almost lyrical, meditating on the image of smoke in art or the psychology of addiction. Gilman’s editorial hand ensures a basic coherence, but he does not flatten the diversity of voices. This is both a strength and a challenge: the book is not designed to be read in one sitting but to be revisited, dipped into, and smoked like a series of cigarettes rather than swallowed as a meal. I found myself returning to particular essays again and again, especially those that explored the symbolic dimensions of smoke — its role in literature, its presence in modernist art, and its metaphorical weight in psychoanalysis. Freud himself, after all, was inseparable from his cigars, and psychoanalysis is haunted by the smoke of his habit.
There is also a subtle ethical question running through the book: how do we write about smoking without glamorising it, without succumbing to the very seductions that made it so pervasive? Gilman and his contributors walk this tightrope carefully. They acknowledge the pleasures, the aesthetics, even the intimacy of smoking, but they also foreground the costs — the millions of deaths, the corporate manipulations, the environmental damage. The balance is delicate, but it is necessary. History cannot be propaganda, and neither can it be blind nostalgia. To write about smoking is to write about human desire itself, in all its destructive and creative capacities.
Reading Smoke in the twenty-first century, when smoking has been pushed to the margins in many societies, carries its own poignancy. In India, for instance, public smoking bans, health warnings on cigarette packs, and the rise of anti-smoking discourse have transformed the act into something furtive, almost shameful. And yet, on countless street corners, men still gather to share a bidi, women still light cigarettes as a gesture of independence, and hookah lounges flourish among the young. The global history of smoking is far from over; it continues to unfold around us. Gilman’s book helps us see these contemporary practices not as isolated phenomena but as part of a centuries-long story of fire, lungs, and longing.
When I closed the book, I felt both enlightened and unsettled. Enlightened, because I had been given a panoramic view of smoking that stretched across continents and centuries, showing me connections I had never considered. Unsettled, because I realised how deeply smoke is woven into the fabric of human culture, how difficult it is to disentangle the toxic from the poetic. Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson of the book: smoke is both destroyer and companion, both killer and muse. To understand it is to understand something fundamental about ourselves.
And so Smoke: A Global History of Smoking remains on my shelf not as a book I have “finished” but as one I continue to inhale in fragments, as one returns to a ritual both harmful and irresistible. Gilman has edited not just a history of smoking but a history of human vulnerability, our capacity to turn even poison into pleasure, and our tendency to wrap mortality in ritual and meaning.
If smoke dissipates, leaving only traces in the air, then this book is its archive, capturing what would otherwise vanish. It is, in its own way, a memorial to centuries of inhalations and exhalations, a testimony to the paradox that sometimes what kills us is also what binds us together.
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February 28, 2023Smoke: A Global History of Smoking by Sander L. Gilman (2004)
October 20, 2015
Można tutaj znaleźć kilka interesujących fragmentów i ilustracji. Niestety tych ciekawszych rzeczy jest zdecydowanie mniej niż tych mniej ciekawych. W pierwszej połowie książki trudno o jakąś syntezę czy bardziej ogólną myśl dotyczącą palenia. Zbyt dużo stron poświęcono opisom akcesoriów do palenia - tutaj z fajki, tutaj cygaro, tutaj szisza, a tutaj jeszcze inna fajka itd. Po kilkudziesięciu stronach zaczyna to przypominać dość nudną wyliczankę. Kiedy w drugiej połowie próba wzniesienia się na nieco bardziej abstrakcyjny poziom zostaje podjęta, kończy się to serią tekstów mogących brać udział w konkursach mistrzostwa nadinterpretacji albo po prostu czystej bzdury. Chyba aż 5 tekstów bezkrytycznie posługuje się psychoanalizą i to jeszcze w jej ortodoksyjnej wersji. Znajdziemy więc kompleks Edypa, lęk przed kastracją itd. Przypominam, że pierwsze wydanie książki miało miejsce w 2004 roku, a nie w 1904. O tym, że psychoanaliza została już dawno odrzucona przez naukowców jako pseudonauka wiadomo więc było od kilkudziesięciu lat. Nieomal 1/3 objętości książki to tego typu brednie. Można się też przyczepić do tłumaczenia. Są przypadki gdzie jest dość oczywiste, że chodziło o miliard a nie bilion dolarów. Tłumacz bezmyślnie pozostawił angielskie "bilion", które znaczy tyle co "miliard". W innym tekście konsekwentnie myleni są Indusi z Indianami. Nie podobał mi się też styl niektórych tekstów. Bywa, że autorzy chcieli na siłę "oczarować" czytelnika, co dla mnie było raczej irytujące. Nie obyło się też bez wartościowania i moralizowania (działania marketingowca, któremu przypisuje się duży wpływ na rozpowszechnienie palenia wśród kobiet zostały nazwane wprost "nikczemnymi"). Mimo wszystko nie da się nie zauważyć, że książka może zaoferować solidny przegląd sposobów palenia obejmujący zasięgiem nie tylko różne kraje i kontynenty, ale również czasy. Da się też znaleźć kilka tekstów-perełek i co ciekawszych akapitów. Jako całość sprawa nie ma się jednak najlepiej. Przez większość czasu podczas lektury raczej się nudziłem.
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