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. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to 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 anti-smoking campaigns by health authorities, pivoted and recovered after the seismic 1964 Surgeon General's Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement - and are now thriving, drenched in profits from their one billion smokers worldwide.
