The Smoking Life

Lavishly-illustrated history of tobacco use around the world and the reaction to it, from the time that Rodrigo de Jerez who sailed with Columbus and brought tobacco home with him was jailed by the Spanish Inquisition, to the 21st century. With fascinating archival art dating back to the 1500s. Who knew that Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe, (yes, they married) visited London to import tobacco, that a tobacco-grudging Persian ruler, Shah Sefi, poured molten lead down the throats of smokers, that beguiling European princesses nearly sneezed their royal heads off with snuff or that well-meaning American medics recommended soothing teething infants' gums with the same ground tobacco?