Complete Stretching or For Your Own Good

Complete Stretching: A New Exercise Program for Health and Vitality

Author: Maxine Tobias

30-minute stretch workouts for exercise through movement, breathing, and relaxation. A dramatic new entry into a crowded field; with full-color illustrations on every page!

Interesting textbook: Drugs for Less or Chen Chiu The Original Acupuncture

For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health

Author: Jacob Sullum

The tobacco controversy is usually portrayed as a battle between selfless defenders of public health and greedy merchants of death. In For Your Own Good, journalist Jacob Sullum argues that such a view conceals the true nature of the crusade for a smoke-free society. As Sullum demonstrates, this struggle is not about the behavior of corporations; it's about the behavior of individuals. It is an attempt by one group of people to impose their tastes and preferences on another. For Your Own Good shows that long before Philip Morris or R. J. Reynolds existed, tobacco's opponents condemned smoking as disgusting, immoral, addictive, unhealthy, and inconsiderate. In recent decades, they have used scientific evidence that smoking is hazardous to enlist the state in their crusade, arguing that the government has an obligation to discourage behavior that might lead to disease or injury. Given this country's tradition of limited government, however, Americans tend to be skeptical of this argument. Sullum justifies their misgivings, noting that achieving a 'smoke-free society' in a nation where tens of millions choose to smoke is necessarily an exercise in tyranny.

Peter Kurth

Before you read any further, folks, I'd advise you to lock your doors. Close the windows and draw the blinds. You're about to hear something you're not supposed to know.

"There is no evidence," writes Jacob Sullum in For Your Own Good, his trenchant analysis of the anti-smoking movement in America, "that casual exposure to second-hand smoke has any impact on your life expectancy." People who live for years with heavy smokers, it's true, run a slightly higher risk of developing lung cancer than people who don't, raising the "lifetime risk," Sullum tells us, "from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent." Neither is there any convincing data to support the claim that smoking imposes a disproportionate financial burden on society, or that advertising, even when aimed at kids, "plays an important role in getting people to smoke, as opposed to getting them to smoke a particular brand."

"Because smokers tend to die earlier than nonsmokers," Sullum remarks crisply, "the costs of treating tobacco-related illness are balanced, and probably outweighed, by savings on Social Security, nursing home stays, and medical care in old age." Sullum, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine and himself a nonsmoker, is dead set against a federal ban on cigarettes and other tobacco products. He's also against their further regulation, not because he thinks smoking is a good idea, but because he thinks that, under the specious guise of science, a moral crusade of 19th century dimensions is operating on the eve of the 21st. He is particularly irritated by what he calls "the Public Health establishment," which, having vanquished most natural epidemics in our time, now treats smoking and other "addictive behaviors" as if they were communicable diseases.

"Behavior cannot be transmitted to other people against their will," Sullum observes. "People do not choose to be sick, but they do choose to engage in risky behavior. The choice implies that the behavior, unlike a viral or bacterial infection, has value. It also implies that attempts to control the behavior will be resisted," especially among the young. Elementary child psychology, not to mention your grandmother's home wisdom, will confirm that the fastest way to get a child to do something is to tell him not to do it. We're all being treated like children anyway, Sullum thinks, when the federal government redefines cigarettes as "nicotine delivery devices" and ignores the truth that every smoker knows -- that smoking is pleasurable, sensual and utilitarian, "relieving boredom," as Sullum says, "soothing distress, aiding concentration [and] warding off loneliness." In other words, smokers are not mere "addicts" in search of a fix, still less the helpless victims of the tobacco companies. Nobody smokes without some benefit to themselves.

Sullum is not a polemicist, and he is not encouraging anyone who reads his book to rush out for a pack of Camels. He wants Americans to make health decisions on their own and for themselves, and he wants an end to smoking hysteria, which, as he vividly demonstrates, has come and gone at different times in history without any lasting result. In the meantime, don't be fooled by the federal government's high moral tone in its fight against Big Tobacco: No government on earth is going to forgo nearly $20 billion a year in tax revenue, no matter who the villains are. -- Salon

New England Journal of Medicine

A curious and challenging mixture of fact and philosophy is what makes this book so intriguing and worthwhile. Sullum marshals an impressive array of facts and arguments in tackling such fundamental issues as addiction, the risks of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, the legitimacy of taxing cigarettes, and the effects of advertising. He has undertaken a truly prodigious amount of research and frequently (but decidedly not always) demonstrates a striking sophistication in discussing technical issues. The history he presents is consistently accurate, and his enumeration of arguments for and against various propositions often exhibits a scholarliness not always found in the work of tobacco-control researchers.

Wall Street Journal - Richard Klein

Compelling. . .you can't help being chilled by the implications of this newly triumphant public health philosophy.

New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Finely reasoned. . .meticulously logical. . .fair and balanced.

Washington Post - Joshua Shenk

For Your Own Good is a must-read.

Richard Klein

Compelling. . .you can't help being chilled by the implications of this newly triumphant public health philosophy. -- The Wall Street Journal

Joshua Shenk

For Your Own Good is a must-read. -- The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

A somewhat predictable libertarian attack on antismoking efforts. Gadflies can perform an important service when public debate is one-sided. In this volume Sullum, a veteran journalist and senior editor of Reason magazine, assumes this mantle and boldly leaps into the ongoing tobacco wars, but is only partially successful. On one hand, he presents a thorough overview of the history of tobacco use and efforts to restrict it, is straightforward about the dangers, and makes a serious effort to shift the grounds of debate from public health to political freedom. On the other hand, he's too willing to focus attention on his opponents rather than on the issue, replicating the ad hominem and straw-man attacks for which he criticizes the antismoking movement. Sullum's argument is that efforts to eliminate smoking are tyrannical and run roughshod over the traditional distinction between other- and self-regarding actions that classical liberals use to distinguish between behavior that should and should not be subject to public control. This is a legitimate concern that has been shoved aside too easily, and his charge of collectivism should not be dismissed as quaint and archaic. However, after clearing the smoke away from the fundamental issue of political values, he asserts his libertarian position rather than arguing for it. Without recognizing that some individual behavior is appropriately restricted, identifying the criteria that distinguish that behavior, and assessing where smoking falls in relation to those criteria, Sullum is just circling the issue his book needs to address. If, as Sullum sarcastically concludes, 'freedom is the most pernicious' risk factor for disease and injuryin the eyes of antismokers, a more disciplined analysis of smoking in relation to freedom is badly needed.

Table of Contents:

	Author's note
	Introduction: Without a Doubt	1
1	From Devil's Weed to Soldier's Friend	15
2	Appropriate Remedial Action	40
3	Coughing Cowboys	82
4	Vice Charge	119
5	Smoke Alarm	138
6	Try, Try Again	181
7	Little White Slavers	220
8	Doctor's Orders	256
Appendix	Ten Myths of the Anti-Smoking Movement	277
	Notes	281
	Bibliography	321
	Acknowledgments	328
	Index	329

Your Guide to Living Well with Rheumatoid Arthritis or Why Beauty Matters

Your Guide to Living Well with Rheumatoid Arthritis

Author: Arthritis Foundation

Approximately 2.5 million Americans live with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a potentially debilitating disease that can cause inflammation and swelling in joints throughout the body. This book stresses the importance of early and aggressive medical treatment of the disease, but also underscores the importance of your role as manager of your disease and of your health-care team. It teaches practical ways to help you live better with RA.

New interesting book: Discovering Homeopathy or Beyond Atkins

Why Beauty Matters

Author: Karen Lee Thorp

Why Beauty Matters explores up-to-the-minute research that has made Newsweek headlines, delves into the breadth of biblical wisdom about beauty, and listens to women as they struggle with issues of physical appearance and spirituality.

Consumer Behavior or Civil Warriors

Consumer Behavior: In Fashion

Author: Michael Solomon

Fashion is a driving force that shapes the way we live—it influences apparel, hairstyles, art, food, cosmetics, cars, music, toys, furniture, and many other aspects of our daily lives that we often take for granted. Fashion is a major component of popular culture—one that is everchanging. With a solid base in social science, and in economic and marketing research, Consumer Behavior: In Fashion provides a comprehensive analysis of today's fashion consumer. Up-to-date, thought-provoking information is presented in an engaging everyday context that helps students, business people and scholars understand how fashion shapes the everyday world of consumers.

Among other special features, this comprehensive text:

• Starts each chapter with a consumer scenario used to analyze concepts covered in the chapter
• Relates consumer behavior concepts specifically to fashion products and processes
• Integrates the rapidly-evolving domain of fashion e-commerce
• Uses numerous fashion ads to explore how fashion companies attempt to communicate with their markets
• Includes both a marketing and consumer approach to the business of fashion
• Highlights both good and bad aspects of fashion marketing and offers a chapter on consumer and business ethics, social responsibility, and environmental issues
• Includes a chapter on consumer protection by business, government, and independent agencies

Book review: Go Dog Go or My Book about Me

Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry

Author: Dan Zegart

Ron Motley hardly slept the night before the verdict.

He went to bed in his suite on the seventh floor of the Radisson at ten o’clock complaining of a headache and never really dozed off. His bodyguard, a refrigerator-sized black man named Larry who once provided security for the Saudi royal family, watched television with him and retired to his room.

Larry was there because Motley had received a steady stream of death threats since he started suing tobacco companies four years earlier. Another came a week before.

“We know where you are and you’ll be dead by midnight,” said a voice on his answering machine back home in South Carolina.

By the spring of 1998, the anti-tobacco side had lost a lot of sleep worrying about stolen information, tapped phones, hidden documents and death threats. It gave rise to jokes about living in a John Grisham novel, but it wasn’t very funny for those on the inside of the experience. Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco whistleblower and close friend of Motley’s, moved out of Louisville, Kentucky after being threatened by telephone and having a bullet left in his mailbox. The bullet was an armor-piercing Israeli specialty round, a very nasty addition to the day’s bills and letters. A lawyer for another ex-tobacco insider became convinced he was being followed one day in traffic, jumped out of his car at a red light, ran back to the other car and screamed that if he ever saw the driver again, he’d beat him to a pulp.

Motley wondered whether it was all a continuum. Would an industry that lied and shredded also wiretap and have you followed? Would they put a bullet in your mailbox?Would they beat you up? Ness, Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole, Motley’s law firm in Charleston, South Carolina, which had spent $30 million on tobacco cases and so far received not a red cent in return, took no chances. They hired the best bodyguard they could find, and that was Larry.

It made eminent sense to me that if anyone was going to be knocked off, it probably should be Motley. I’d traveled with him enough to know he was the war-time consigliere, the chief soldier on the plaintiff’s side. Here in Muncie, Indiana, he put his case against the industry before a jury for six long weeks in February and March of 1998. He had spent almost five years building it, fighting to get documents, taking scores of depositions, developing elaborate charts and videos on how tobacco smoke assaults the lung, befriending people like Jeff Wigand, whom Motley flew to Charleston after Wigand lost his home, his job and his marriage.

And now, having completed the biggest fight of his tobacco life, Motley ached to go to sleep. But he couldn’t.

Forty other people from Ness, Motley had also come to Muncie, taking the whole third and seventh floors of the Radisson for offices and sleeping quarters and living there from January into the spring. While Motley tossed and turned upstairs, most of them were at a big, loud party in the Radisson bar, where they got drunker and blearier than they had gotten in a really long time. The men and women who attack giant corporations for a living aren’t shy and retiring, and there was a good deal of bright plumage in evidence — pastel suits, paisley ties and cowboy boots — and an abundance of comely female junior lawyers and aides in form-fitting dresses and short skirts. There was a lot of noise and a lot of laughter. A little later, some of the tobacco lawyers showed up, a quieter, more conservative breed. But in the end, the tobacco crowd and the plaintiff’s bunch made merry together, more or less, the steadily drinking tobacco men drooping in their trenchcoats over the Ness, Motley women.

Motley didn’t materialize downstairs until the next afternoon, a full day into the jury’s deliberations and long after the party had ended. He strolled into the lobby and sat down in a chair to wait for news. Within minutes he was surrounded by the secretaries and paralegals and junior lawyers who make his entourage one of the more fetching flying circuses outside of the rock ‘n roll world, about which a female reporter in Florida once remarked, “Aren’t there any male assistants?” Somebody opened a couple of beers and the ladies took turns massaging his neck.

It was a balmy March day in Indiana and by seven o’clock there was still no word from the jury. Someone arranged to have a Suburban come and take what was generally called the Motley Crew — and me — to a steak restaurant.

As we drove across the little city and its gloomy boarded-up downtown, I thought back to the summer of 1994, when I first met Ron Motley, which in retrospect seemed a time of such optimism and simplicity.

The man who answered the door of a New Orleans hotel room had slicked-back black hair and a deep Southern accent. He wore a hand-tailored blue silk suit, but his socks didn’t match. I later learned he was color blind. His handshake was ice cold, as if all the blood had gone to his face, which was red. He had piercing dark eyes, but a voice like warm bourbon.

We sat down and talked while he munched a waffle at a little glass-topped table near the window, his right leg bouncing up and down like it had electrodes on it.

He became steadily more intoxicated with his story as he explained why he was out to get the tobacco men.

“I’m telling you, you can’t find a family in America they haven’t touched,” he said, veins standing out in his neck.

“That’s why we’re going to beat ‘em.”

He sprang up and fluttered through the room, yanking papers out of a briefcase, stepping into the bathroom.

“Eventually,” he muttered, peering into the mirror.

Then he darted out and grabbed the phone, charming his way past a colleague’s child to learn whether Ness, Motley had won a court decision on a $1.3 billion asbestos lawsuit.

At that time, Motley and others were massing the talent of the biggest personal injury law firms in the country for an assault on the hitherto impregnable citadel of tobacco. This coalition improved the odds considerably for the plaintiff’s side against an industry that by a very conservative estimate had wiped out seven million Americans since the Surgeon General first warned that cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

Another set of arithmetic showed that the several dozen firms that joined forces with Motley had during their careers extracted billions of dollars from the asbestos and pharmaceuticals industries whose products had injured a tiny fraction of the lives laid waste by cigarettes. Yet the tobacco industry had never paid damages to a soul. To the plaintiff’s lawyers, the cigarette cartel was Mount Everest, or maybe Fort Knox. These two forces seemed destined to meet in some historic conflict.

Copyright 2000 by Dan Zegart

New York Times Book Review - Roger Parloff

[If] the reader is looking for a highly readable overview of the sprawling tobacco litigation, told briskly, comprehensively and comprehensibly by an excellent storyteller, then Civil Warriors is a good pick.

Kirkus Reviews

An account of the 30-year war waged by lawyers, scientists, whistle blowers, and health crusaders against the tobacco companies. Investigative journalist Zegart spent five years researching a complicated story of dying lung cancer victims who sued tobacco companies (such as Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Brown & Williamson) through the efforts of Ron Motley, a southern lawyer who won many product liability cases involving asbestos. Motley could not forget the memory of his mother, a heavy smoker, dying painfully of lung cancer, and he gradually built up a file of research scientists (who proved that the biochemistry of human cells was changed by the addictive nature of nicotine) and whistle blowers (who provided the evidence that tobacco companies suppressed public knowledge of the addictive qualities of nicotine). He also discovered evidence that at least one company spiked extra nicotine into the cigarettes to create permanently addicted customers. When many state attorneys-general combined their efforts to defeat Big Tobacco in court, it was found that companies had known for years from their own research that cigarette smoking was a leading cause of lung cancer but had lied about it. An interesting story of a victory for justice led by a hero lawyer and gritty, never-say-die crusaders who worked around the clock for years. A glossary of the numerous characters coming in and out of the book could have aided the reader, however.

Subtle Aromatherapy or Carbophobia

Subtle Aromatherapy

Author: Patricia Davis

First book devoted solely to a subtle or spiritual level.

New interesting book: Pro SQL Server 2008 Xml or The Internet and Society

Carbophobia: The Scary Truth about America's Low-Carb Craze

Author: Michael Greger

Everywhere you go these days, it seems, the Atkins "A" can be found. In the first six months of 2004, no fewer than 1,864 new "low-carb" products were launched-everything from low-carb pasta to low-carb gummy bears. Yet warnings from medical authorities continue to pour in. How have low-carb diet gurus managed to mislead millions of people onto a diet opposed by so many-including the American Dietetic Association, the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the National Institutes of Health?

In the first book of its kind, Dr. Michael Greger draws together decades of research to decisively debunk the purported "science" behind the low-carb claims. Carbophobia documents just how ineffective the Atkins Diet and other low-carb plans have been in producing sustainable weight loss, and lists the known hazards inherent to the diet. This is not a case of academic "he said/she said." It is a case of major food industry players choosing to ignore all the current evidence-based dietary recommendations to protect their financial interests no matter what the human cost.

Publishers Weekly

Vegetarian nutrition specialist Greger dedicates this goal-oriented volume to discrediting the effectiveness and healthfulness of low-carbohydrate diets, especially the ubiquitous Atkins Diet. But the author, creator of www.AtkinsExposed.com, says his book is "not the Dr. Greger Diet versus the Dr. Atkins Diet. This is a century of medical science versus the Atkins diet." In fact, Greger cites hundreds of respectable resources that back up his theories; of the volume's 176 pages, 72 are filled with lists of references. The 104 remaining pages are generally reader-friendly and compelling, although readers might feel that they're stuck in the middle of a mud-slinging war instead of receiving helpful diet advice (for example, Greger points out that "on August 3, 2004, the legal department of the Atkins Corporation sent me a letter threatening to sue me for speaking out against the Atkins Diet on my website," and then spends a chapter refuting the corporation's claims). Still, this is an interesting counterpoint to a diet philosophy that has swept the nation, and it raises valid points that anyone concerned for their health may want to consider before committing to a low-carb existence. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.