Rating: 
Summary: Where'd I leave my sense of humor?...
Review: "Thank You For Smoking" made me reconsider my perspective on even the most hated industries (in this case the tobacco industry). Although likened to Satan, the protagonist, Nick Naylor is just an ordinary person who is doing what he can to keep his job and pay his mortgage. When put in that perspective, Naylor is even a likable guy--you can hate him for advocating cigarettes, but you can't hate him for being human. A feminist is more likely to be angry with the protagonist for his objectification of women than a non-smoker is going to hate him for lobbying for the tobacco industry. Buckley does well in his characterization of the protagonist but slightly lags behind on the others. What he tells you of the other characters is only what Nick can see, thus giving you more insight to Nick than anyone else. I picked up this book as a requirement for a class under the sales pitch that it was the "funniest book you will ever read." After opening the cover, I was beginning to wonder if I had left my sense of humor back home because I was simply not finding anything worthy of a chuckle. However, after pressing on (and may I remind you this was for a class), I found myself thoroughly entertained once Nick was kidnapped by Peter Lorre and the author had proved his cleverness by coming up with Nick's perfect punishment--being covered with nicotine patches! With this stunt, Buckley had gained my trust and I could finish the book in a more responsive frame of mind. Although I never would have picked this book up on my own, I found it to be an easy and entertaining piece of writing. I am glad to have read it because I showed myself that despite being an extremely picky reader, I can once in a while let go enough to broaden my horizons.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant and laugh-out-loud insight
Review: As a person who used to do what these characters do, I have to admit I laughed out loud as I blushed. The shameless and never-ending spin Buckley wrote about in _Thank You for Smoking_ was a painful - and probably inadvertent - prediction of what we've reduced public policy to in the last decade. Although I'm not as fond of Buckley's other novels, this book receives my highest honor: I buy it over and over again because I'm constantly loaning it to to people who never get it back.
Rating: 
Summary: Light pleasant satire
Review: Buckley has a light, pleasant, humorous easy-to-read style, and he fully understands the double-think, newspeak and weasel words that are inherent in the political games, pro and con, surrounding tobacco. No one comes off looking good here. Everyone is a liar with ulterior motives concerning power, perks and attention. Unfortunately, his characters are really more caricatures than anything else. Still, this is a funny work, and I'd recommend it to get the Big Picture on Big Tobacco, and far worse, Big Government.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely witty, original, funny.
Review: Even with a short attention span, a dislike for contemporary fiction and a natural resistance to forced reading assignments, I managed to thoroughly enjoy the wit and humor found in Christopher Buckley's Thank You for Smoking. The protagonist is the antagonist; the attitude is dark yet truthful and the characters artfully dynamic. Nick Naylor is the chief spokesperson for the Academy of Tobacco Studies. He pays his mortgage by stretching, twisting and hiding the truth about tobacco from the public, and as a result lives his life as a target for despise. Buckley's talent as a writer concisely and sarcastically reveals the culmination of events that grow from Naylor's continual and conscious lying. The readers' separation from Nick's dangerous life provides perspective for humor - continuing to prove the "it's funny when someone else falls down" theory. As Nick's awareness and follies increase so does the readers' fondness for this tragic hero. When boss-man, BR, turns up the heat, Nick's urgency to regain the integrity of tobacco for a newly health-conscious society shifts into a high gear. He begins to make blatantly false public statements that in turn introduce him to death-threatening enemies and the praise of the Captain, the tobacco-god. With manic intensity he continues to finagle his way into the media until he is so deeply loved and hated that bodyguards, FBI interrogations and secrete plots with his fellow "Merchants of Death" become necessary. Oddly, Nick's increasingly good job results in an increasingly malignant response from his boss, and the notion of internal tobacco scandal calls for extreme measures. The curious scandal and how Nick manipulates and escapes brilliantly fuels the plot. Buckley writes with a mesmerizing tempo, gluing your eyes to the pages. Between his cynicism, humor and talent for creating anticipation, Buckley weaves Thank you for Smoking into a book that is impossible to leave unfinished. My only criticism is the last chapter, which is weak and jumps almost too radically to a pleasant conclusion, however the fury of events leading up to that single final chapter makes the book well-worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: The Test
Review: I always know I'll like someone if they liked this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Unengaging
Review: I was hoping I'd like this satirical novel. But two chapters in, and it just wasn't up to the standard of Max Barry or Ben Elton, so I gave up. (DNF)
Rating:
Summary: damn good book
Review: I was relieved when I saw the book Thank You For Smoking on my class syllabus instead of some boring textbook. No one knew anything about it, but a comedy about such serious topics sounded interesting. I just hoped the politics wouldn't overwhelm the humor. But after reading the first line I was hooked, or perhaps more appropriately "addicted," to Buckley's writing style. This is a great book. Thank You For Smoking plunges readers headfirst into the dark, two-faced world of the tobacco industry. The protagonist (or antagonist?) is Nick Naylor, whose job as chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco studies is not unlike that of a mass undertaker. His line of work requires him to be an absolute weasel, but Naylor is a natural. He's willing to sink to despicable lows to promote tobacco, and he eventually pays the price for his outright shamelessness. The book begins at the "Clean Lungs" conference, where Naylor isn't exactly Mr. Popular, with one of the speakers blatantly comparing him to Satan. He is despised by the crowd, and as the reader quickly learns, the majority of the American public. But Naylor remains composed throughout the conference and throughout the book, for that matter, and before you know it you're on this scumbag's side. Buckley has done an excellent job in making the bad guys good, and the good guys bad. He even has you rooting for the devious heads of the alcohol and firearm industries. Nick Naylor is fighting a losing battle and he knows it. He must remain strong to keep from losing his job, but it's hard to fight the facts everyone knows all too well: smoking isn't good for you. In light of the evidence stacked against smoking, even his opposition has to agree he's got a tough job. But Naylor is a warrior, and his excuses and public antics are laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Buckley has created a character whose ability to shift the blame and react quickly to criticism is almost superhuman. I enjoyed this book immensely. As I was leafing through it now to refresh my memory for this review I kept catching myself reading whole paragraphs and pages. As cliché as it sounds, it's hard to put it down.
Rating:
Summary: opinion
Review: I would have never guessed that I would even consider reading a book about a PR man for the tobacco industry ... and I certainly could have never imagined that if I did, I'd enjoy it so much! I picked up Thank You For Smoking at the suggestion of a friend, and was pulled into the narrative immediately. The story is so tightly and entertainingly written that I practically inhaled it (pun intended), taking less than a day to finish the book's nearly 300 pages even though for the most part I had to read it a few pages at a time while working at a conference. Author Christopher Buckley pulled off the seemingly impossible here: making a despicable protagonist like Nick Naylor seem sympathetic. I won't go into the way Mr. Buckley does it, but it is definitely worth finding out for yourself. My only complaint is that the ending to the story wraps up a little too neatly, a little too much like Hollywood. It's a weakness, but not a serious enough of a weakness to cloud the value of this original and clever book.
Rating:
Summary: Great satire, so-so thriller
Review: Nick Naylor, the protagonist of Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Smoking," gives new definition to the term "antihero." Despite his position, he's not really a bad guy. Sure, he makes six figures a year lying through his teeth as the chief lobbyist at the Academy of Tobacco Studies in Washington, but he's not really making anybody smoke cigarettes. As he explains it, he's just moderating between two competing groups, namely the cigarette companies and the anti-smoking zealots. Besides, someone's got to pay the mortgage and his son's prep-school tuition. Even he realizes that his rationalization sounds like something a Nuremberg defendant might say ("I vas only paying ze mortgage"), but it takes a certain courage to go on TV and say there's no demonstrable link between smoking and disease. Perhaps Buckley's greatest achievement here is that he can take a guy who lies to sell cigarettes and make him into a sympathetic figure. Nick Naylor's life provides the basis for Buckley's often hilarious look at the "neo-puritanism" of mid-nineties America and the attempts of tobacco companies to fight it. And although I hate cigarettes, I think a book like this needed to be written. Anybody who's ever been repulsed by those ridiculous "Truth" ads where a bunch of obnoxious young people harass those who make and sell cigarettes should get a good laugh at Buckley's portrayal of the sanctimonious forces of political correctness. As Nick tells Oprah Winfrey in one uproarious scene, cigarette opponents aren't above manipulating children and trying to tell everyone else how to think. And anything that takes the wind out of the sails of political correctness is fine by me. Much of the book's humor comes from Nick's lunch meetings with his friends in the Mod (an acronym for "Merchants of Death") Squad. Composed of Nick, alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey, and one-armed gun advocate Bobby Jay Bliss, the Mod Squad is sort of a combination support group and mutual admiration society. In the presence of their own, the three death merchants can work on their PR strategies, discuss their latest misfortunes at the hands of the neo-puritans, and compare just how much death they've caused and how hated they are. In one particularly humorous scene, Polly and Bobby Jay are saying how much hate mail they get, and Nick just scoffs and says, "HATE mail? ALL of my mail is hate mail." Of course, even satires need plots, so Buckley throws in some intrigue regarding a plot to have Nick killed. When a team of killers kidnaps Nick and covers him in nicotine patches, Nick finds himself suspected by the FBI of having done the deed himself as a PR stunt. In an effort to clear his name, Nick eventually traces the attempt on his life to a conspiracy in the upper levels of the tobacco lobby. Although this plot had possibilities, it felt somewhat underdeveloped to me. At a mere 272 pages, "Thank You for Smoking" isn't quite long enough to function effectively as both a satire and a thriller. The plot's pretty interesting, I just would've like to see a little more space devoted to it. Still, this book is worth a read. It's fast-paced, well written, and remarkably perceptive. More than once I found myself laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. If an avid non-smoker like myself can find himself rooting for a tobacco lobbyist, than anyone can.
Rating:
Summary: Simply the funniest book I've ever read
Review: Only Christopher Buckley could findd the humor in being a corporate PR representative for the tobacco companies. He deftly manages to make the main character both amusing, and even the object of our sympathies as he lands in one outlandish predicament after another. Pick up this book for a good laugh.
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