If you've ever smoked, this lengthy essay on the subject will stir some best and worst memories. If you never have, NICOTINE may make you wonder what you've been missing.

This is German writer Gregor Hens’ self-therapeutic retrospective on his relationship with the demon weed. Though it has been a long time since he had a cigarette, Hens’ recollections are powerful. He smoked because he was glad, because he was sad. He smoked to mark time. He smoked fiercely after short periods of abstinence, as on an airplane trip. Though he never wished to join them, he still feels kinship with the poor souls doomed to smoke in the littered dark alleyways offered to workplace addicts as "designated smoking areas." Born with the habit already fixed in his genetic code from his smoking mother, Hens had his first ciggy when barely out of toddlerhood.

"If you've ever smoked, this lengthy essay on the subject will stir some best and worst memories. If you never have, NICOTINE may make you wonder what you've been missing."

Looking back on the smoking years, Hens is constructing a loosely jointed memoir. Was it his mother's smoking or his cold domineering father who had conquered the habit that most influenced him to rebel with cigarettes? Being sent away to a school where the tiniest infraction could result in what would now be considered abuse, if not downright torture, only made the boy more attached to the wicked habit: "I was the third son returned from boarding school as a heavy smoker." Quitting was a continued subject for self-study but always led back to addiction...until the last time, of course.

Having decided to "write my way out of my addiction," the author examines not just the urge and the act, but the many ingrained habits and behaviors that go with smoking. Despite chronic bronchitis that afflicted him from an early age, he kept smoking. Despite all the scientific evidence about the dangers, he kept smoking. He notes that even the inventor of psychology, Sigmund Freud, could not give up cigars when suffering from mouth cancer. Smoking, Hens asserts (and all smokers would agree), paradoxically offers the sensation of free will, while blocking the exercise of that will when it comes to renunciation. He encounters various therapies and also invents his own--- letting himself deeply crave a cigarette, contemplating its relative harmlessness to himself and others, and finding reasons within himself for not having one.

NICOTINE is nothing like a manual for giving up smoking; it does not berate the smoker or extol the healthy benefits of giving up the habit. It is more like an ode, ironic but poetic, to the eponymous drug that does irreversible damage, yet gives its user a sensation of control and calm, of time-passing and occasion-remembering that is hard to set aside once one has experienced it. While Hens has clearly quit, and notes good reasons for doing so, including the simple ability to choose to do what he wants, he does not condemn the sinner...or the sin. Convinced of the “plasticity” of the human brain, he believes that though we can't unlearn, we can relearn, pasting new patterns over the old, and ends by boldly inviting the reader to light up --- but “more attentively than usual.”