Smoke Damage

North Carolina State University sociologist Michael Schwalbe’s new book, “Smoke Damage: Voices from the Front Lines of America’s Tobacco Wars,” (University of Wisconsin Press/2011) is a collection of portraits of people whose lives have been changed by tobacco. The images and the stories that accompany them span a wide range of ages, social classes and professional disciplines, from lawyers and farmers to disease survivors. The intimate photos tell a story not captured by statistics, but the book is not merely sentimental.