Balkan Smoke places Mary Neuburger squarely at the forefront of the burgeoning field of consumption, commodities, and material culture studies about East-Central Europe.... Neuburger adeptly ties together numerous strands of culture, economics, politics, and ideas into a coherent narrative of the ever-changing and competing expressions of "Bulgaria.'
Ab Imperio
In Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria, Neuburger masterfully demonstrates how the yellow-leafed plant has been at the core of building the historical narrative of modern day Bulgaria. More importantly, it also reveals in a particularly poignant way the complex dynamics of national consumption and global flows of goods and the ideologies they encapsulate.... Neuburger has a keen eye both for factual details and for cultural minutia, which reveals her remarkable ease and extreme, almost native-like, level of comfort and familiarity with the often hidden nuances of Bulgaria's less obvious cultural references.
Consumption Markets & Culture
Mary C. Neuburger's brilliant new book recounts the social life of tobacco in the past two centuries.... It creatively utilizes the extensive Bulgarian literature on the tobacco industry and cultural works on everyday life to produce a highly original account of the making of Bulgarian modernity.... [A] remarkably well-researched and inspiringly written work.
American Historical Review
Neuburger's work sharpens our understandings of Bulgarian economic history.... It is dense stuff, and I am terribly impressed with Neuburger?s ability to bring it all together in a coherent narrative. She has added a new thread to our understanding of the development of modern nationalism.
Slavic Review
One of the strongest contributions of Balkan Smoke is Neuburger's method. She uses tobacco and smoking as a lens through which to rethink the parameters of Bulgarianhistory. In doing so, she argues that tobacco production and consumption spurred deep transformations and brought a modern condition to Bulgaria's tobacco-growing regions.... Tobacco runs through each topic and it is evident that they are all tied to the others in both obvious and hidden ways. And this is precisely where Balkan Smoke shines.
Ab Imperio
This fascinating book explores the history of tobacco and tobacco culture in Bulgaria from the mid-19th century, when the country became partially and then fully independent from the Ottoman Empire, to the postcommunist present. Neuburger... argues convincingly that smoking and the production of tobacco products played an important?if not the key?part in Bulgaria's political, economic; and cultural modernization during this period.... Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Choice
This smart, scrupulous, and elegant volume shows just how much interpretative power and creative reach a carefully executed commodity history can have. Balkan Smoke takes up the story of tobacco in a society that, like no other, has been shaped by the plant's production, distribution, consumption, and incorporation into mass and high culture.... Balkan Smoke is a thoughtful, innovative work of history writing and, in many ways, a valuable, fresh, and highly original contribution not just to national and regional historiography but to European history and economic history more generally, and to the expanding field of commodity studies.
The Journal of Modern History
