Growing up on a small island, seaside resort in New Jersey, I had little interest in Asia until October of 1968 when the US Army whisked me off to Vietnam where I served in the 525th Military Intelligence Group. My duties were fairly broad; however, the part I liked best was reviewing and analyzing intelligence information reports that dealt with both the political and tactical situation in the Vietnamese Highlands. Leaving the army in 1971, I returned to college and decided to pursue a Bache...

I was born nicotine-stained; it's true.

My mother was a nineteen-year-old dancer and had been smoking since the age of ten, when she first went on the stage with a children's troop after the end of World War I. My father had been given a classical education in a prestigious Catholic college in England, to find himself with a wife and no skills whatsoever to make a living (his family had disowned him when he announced to them his marriage to an eighteen-year-old chorus girl).

What to do? M...