Thank You for Smoking

Zusatztext A savagely funny satirical farce. . . . produces moments that make you laugh out loud at their inspired absurdity. The New York Times Buckley's caricatures of Washington politics! corporate power plays! media spin control! Hollywood pretensions and the human foibles of self-delusion and denial are appallingly right on the money. San Francisco Chronicle Seriously funny . . . Forget apple pie. [Buckley's] novel is as American as pork barrels and public relations. The Atlanta Journal & Constitution The superior goofball plot! raffish cast and zany sex scenes make this the funniest of Buckley's books. Time Hilarious. The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Christopher Buckley Klappentext NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He's a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studiesin other words, a flack for cigarette companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He's so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical, that he's become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of Nick Naylor? Zusammenfassung NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He's a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studiesin other words! a flack for cigarette companies! paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He's so good at his job! so effortlessly unethical! that he's become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease! what will become of Nick Naylor? ...

Autorentext

Christopher Buckley

Klappentext

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies–in other words, a flack for cigarette companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He’s so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical, that he’s become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of Nick Naylor?

Leseprobe
1
 
There was a thick stack of WHILE YOU WERE OUTS when he got back to the Academy’s office in one of the more interesting buildings on K Street, hollowed out in the middle with a ten-story atrium with balconies dripping with ivy. The overall effect was that of an inside-out corporate Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A huge neo-deco-classical fountain on the ground floor provided a continuous and soothing flow of splashing white noise. The Academy of Tobacco Studies occupied the top three floors. As a senior vice president for communications at ATS, or “the Academy” as BR insisted it be called by staff, Nick was entitled to an outside corner office, but he chose an interior corner office because he liked the sound of running water. Also, he could leave his door open and the smoke would waft out into the atrium. Even smokers care about proper ventilation.
 
He flipped through the stack of pink slips waiting for him at the receptionist’s stand. “CBS needs react to SG’s call for ban on billboard ads.” ABC, NBC, CNN, etc., etc., they all wanted the same, except for USA Today, which needed a react to tomorrow’s story in The New England Journal of Medicine announcing medical science’s conclusion that smoking also leads to something called Buerger’s disease, a circulatory ailment that requires having all your extremities amputated. Just once, Nick thought, it would be nice to get back to the office to something other than blame for ghastly new health problems.
 
“Your mother called,” said Maureen, the receptionist, handing him one last slip. “Good morning,” she said chirpily into her headset, exhaling a stream of smoke. She began to cough. No dainty little throat-clearer, either, but a deep, pulmonary bulldozer. “Academy of”—hargg—“Tobacco”—kuhhh—“Studies.”
 
Nick wondered if having a receptionist who couldn’t get through “hello” without a broncospasm was a plus.
 
He liked Maureen. He wondered if he should tell her not to cough if BR walked by. Enough heads had rolled in the last six months. Murad IV was in charge now.
 
Back in his office, Nick took off his new Paul Stuart sports jacket and hung it on the back of the door. One advantage to the change in Academy leadership was the new dress code. One of the first things BR had done had been to call in all the smokesmen—that is, the Academy’s PR people, the ones who went in front of the cameras—and told them he didn’t want them looking like a bunch of K Street dorks. Part of tobacco’s problem, he said, was that the sex had gone out of it. He wanted them, he said, to look like the people in the fashion ads, and not the ones for JC Penney’s Presidents’ Day sale. Then he gave them each a five-thousand-dollar clothing allowance. Everyone walked out of the meeting thinking, What a great boss! Half of them got back to their desks to find memos saying they’d been fired.
 
Nick looked at his desk and frowned. It was very annoying. He was not an anal person, he could cope with a certain amount of clutter, but he did not like being the depository for other people’s clutter. He had explained this to Jeannette, and she had said, in that earnest way of hers, that she completely understood, and yet she continued to use his desk as a compost heap. The problem was that though Jeannette was technically under Nick in communications, BR had brought her with him from Allied Vending and they obviously had this rapport. The odd thing was how she acted as if Nick were her real boss, with rights of high, middle, and low justice over her.
 
She had dumped five piles of EPA reports on secondhand smoke on his desk, all of them marked URGENT. Nick collected knives. She had carefully placed his leather-sheathed Masai pigsticker on top of one of the piles. Was this insolence masquerading as neatness?
 
Gazelle, his secretary, buzzed to say that BR had left word he wanted to see him as soon as he got back from Clean Lungs. Nick decided he would not report to BR immediately. He would make a few calls and then go and make his report to BR. There. He felt much better, indeed swollen with independence.
 
“BR said soon as you got back, Nick,” Gazelle buzzed him a few moments later, as if reading his thoughts. Gazelle, a pretty black single mother in her early thirties, was very bossy with Nick, for Nick, having been largely raised in a household dominated by a black housekeeper of the old school, was powerless before the remonstrations of black women.
 
“Yes, Gazelle,” he said tartly, even this stretching the limits of his ability to protest. Nick knew what was going on in Gazelle’s intuitive head: she knew that Jeannette had her beady eyes on his job tide, and that her own job depended on Nick’s keeping his.
 
Still, he would not be ruled by his secretary. He had had a harrowing morning and he would take his time. The silver-framed picture of Joey, age twelve, looke…