About Smoking (Intermediate) and About Smoking (Advanced) are stories that were written by students. They describe how and why they started smoking, how it affects their lives, and what their concerns are about smoking. They are nicely illustrated with simple line drawings by Jerry Lee Miller that complement the selections on that page. Each entry is short, and the printing is large, so that a student can open the book anywhere and find a story or commentary which is interesting, easy-to-read and complete.

Tips on Quitting is a brochure that flips open to nine different areas, such as “Do you smoke because….” and “When you are stressed….” Each of these areas provides brief commentaries, in point form, about the opening statement. This brochure is a great document to have lying around for students to pick up and read at their leisure in classrooms, waiting rooms and lounges.

My students liked these small books; they commented that the books did not preach and they agreed with the kinds of comments they read. Because many of these

comments are written by people who still smoke, the books avoid the tone of readers being “told what to do”. Rather, they approach the issue of smoking as a problem that many of the contributors still need to solve, or would like to solve. At the same time, there are comments from people who are bothered by others who smoke, or who have watched someone close to them suffer from the effects of smoking.

Different from books which are meant to be read from cover-to-cover, all three of these publications are good casual reading that someone can look at, even for brief periods of time. I recommend them for use in classrooms and elsewhere.