NON-FICTION: Tobacconia

THIS SMOKING WORLD—A. E. Hamilton—Century ($2.50).

TOBACCO: a digest of clinical data—Pierre Schrumpf-Pierron M. D.—Hoeber ($1.85).

For some time now the threat of tobacco prohibition in the U. S. has subsided to an occasional murmur. It began vigorously in 1878, with the founding of the Anti-Tobacco Society in New York; it sank this year as Kansas, last state with an antitobacco law, repealed its pertinent legislation. The sequence recalls 17th Century Persian history; Shah Abbas made his tobacco-using courtiers smoke camel's dung for punishment; his grandson Shah Sen poured hot, melted lead down...