Joshua Knelman

Joshua Knelman

Joshua Knelman is an award-winning author, a founding member of The Walrus magazine, and the recipient of multiple National Magazine Awards. His writing has appeared in The WalrusToronto LifeNational Post, and The Globe and Mail. His debut true crime bestseller, Hot Art, earned the Crime Writers of Canada Best Non-Fiction Book Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. He lives in Toronto.

You’ll inhale this tell-all book about the tobacco industry and never look at a No Smoking sign the same way again!” –Margaret Atwood

FESTIVAL BOOK

Firebrand: A Tobacco Lawyer’s Journey

Mad Men meets Bad Blood in this addictive, behind-the-scenes globe-trotting narrative of moral ambiguity, law, public policy, and big tobacco.

It’s the start of the new millennium and a young lawyer is recruited to work for an unnamed multinational company. It isn’t until his second interview that the product the company produces is revealed to him: cigarettes. Possibly the most controversial consumer product in human history: seductive, addictive, and deadly – yet completely legal. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to help successfully market cigarettes in dozens of countries.

Firebrand ventures into the heart of the tobacco industry and the icy paradoxes of capitalism, each chapter a counterintuitive lesson on how cigarette companies – the target of increasingly intense anti-smoking campaigns and government regulations, including the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement – continue to pivot and thrive in the 21st century, inhaling profits from their one billion smokers worldwide.

As Mad Men did for the alcohol-fueled, oversexed, corrupt world of New York advertising, Firebrand does for the even more despised world of big tobacco, in an addictive, behind-the-scenes piece of storytelling. The lawyer’s work takes him from manufacturing factories to hocking “sticks” at U.K. corner store counters; from tacky resorts in Spain and pirate city-states to luxury hotels and Grand Prix events across European and Asian cities. A contemporary tale of our ambiguous times, told with character-based drive and dry humour, Firebrand is a grand tour of the compelling paradoxes of globalization and corporate culture, shrink-wrapped in an engrossing narrative of a morally dubious yet completely legal enterprise.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library

ALL EVENTS WITH Joshua Knelman

7 PM
Inter-Activity: Question Everything
Oct 03 @ 7 PM MT - 8:30 PM MT

DJD Dance Centre

111 12 Ave SE
5 PM
Happy Hour: Joshua Knelman & Jason Logan
Oct 04 @ 5 PM MT - 6 PM MT

Memorial Park Library, Alexander Calhoun Salon

1221 2 St SW