Reviews…
Richard W Illingworth
Understand why you smoke, then quit …
This is an entertaining, instructive and effective book. With a “no holds barred” approach, it exposes the failure and hypocrisy of government in colluding to the continuing manufacture and sale of cigarettes (and other tobacco products), the laughable evasion and outright deception from “Big Tobacco”. It amuses with anecdotes describing the committed smoking behaviour of some celebrities.
Compelling psychological insight and sympathy for us smokers, without resorting to “aversion therapy”, provides the reader with an approach to (addictive) behaviour that can be generalized and applied beyond smoking. Read this book and enjoy it. If you smoke and you want to stop it may just provide you with a much less traumatic exit from your addiction than you imagined possible.
Dr V Harding
It’s not what you think it is!
This is an instructive and amusing book which shows a good deal of sympathy to smokers. Little is said about the harmful effects of smoking which is very different from other quit smoking books. It also takes a wider and evidence-based approach to the stop-smoking as well as the smoking industry; the criticism of nicotine products as an aid to quitting is particularly interesting for me (I’m a health professional) – it clarified for me how the medical profession has indeed got it wrong and is not being particularly effective with these. The coverage is comprehensive and includes amusingly satirical views on electronic cigarettes, the tobacco companies, doctors and a certain celebrity smoker – a particularly well-written chapter appropriately called ‘The Tragedy of Smoking’. Above all, it is Dr Symonds’s account of his personal experience in treating smokers which for me gives this book its special appeal and resonance.
I am not a smoker but am suggesting my friends who are get the book and read it through. If you’re a smoker and read this book, you wouldn’t want to smoke any more after you’d finished it, and would now have the approach to take to stop.