Product Details
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books (January 27, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0142000981
- ISBN-13: 978-0142000984
Professional Review from Publisher Weekly:
Coal has been both lauded for its efficiency as a heating fuel and maligned for the lung-wrenching black smoke it gives off. In her first book, Freese, an assistant attorney general of Minnesota (where she helps enforce environmental laws), offers an exquisite chronicle of the rise and fall of this bituminous black mineral. Both the Romans and the Chinese used coal ornamentally long before they discovered its flammable properties. Once its use as a heating source was discovered in early Roman Britain, coal replaced wood as Britain's primary energy source. The jet-black mineral spurred the Industrial Revolution and inspired the invention of the steam engine and the railway. Freese narrates the discovery of coal in the colonies, the development of the first U.S. coal town, Pittsburgh, and the history of coal in China. Despite its allure as a cheap and warm energy source, coal carries a high environmental cost. Burning it produces sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide in such quantities that, during the Clinton administration, the EPA targeted coal-burning power plants as the single worst air polluters. Using EPA studies, Freese shows that coal emissions kill about 30,000 people a year, causing nearly as many deaths as traffic accidents and more than homicides and AIDS. The author
contends that alternate energy sources must be found to ensure a healthier environment for future
contends that alternate energy sources must be found to ensure a healthier environment for future
generations. Part history and part environmental argument, Freese's elegant book teaches an important lesson about the interdependence of humans and their natural environment both for good and ill throughout history.
Customer Review from Amazon.com:
Freese's book is an excellent and engaging history of the history of coal and its relationship to the
history of three nations: The United Kingdom, the United States, and China. She writes exceptionally fluidly, with, at once, broad sweeps and minute details that keep you both interetsed and informed. She also has a lovely dry sense of humor. Her chapter on Manchester, by the way, is excellent.
The book isn't academic (to her credit), but nor is it a vapid popular account. Instead, Freese has written a book that does the nearly impossible in that it is well-researched, historically accurate,
engaging almost, but not, to the point of being chatty. I couldn't put it down. What it lacks, by way of
an academic angle, is a discussion of what else had been written in the past about the history of coal, as well as a theoretical approach. This is hardly a criticism because that really isn't the intention of this book. In fact, believe the book would have suffered had she taken this approach.
I agree with another reviewer who suggested that Freese didn't know how to end the book--although I did find her discussion of alternatives to coal to be compelling. There are two typos in the book that evaded the copy editor, but otherwise this book is a small masterpiece. You will enjoy it.
In reading this book, the reader not only gets a complete history of coal, but also information and statistics concerning coal's impact on the environment.
The book isn't academic (to her credit), but nor is it a vapid popular account. Instead, Freese has written a book that does the nearly impossible in that it is well-researched, historically accurate,
engaging almost, but not, to the point of being chatty. I couldn't put it down. What it lacks, by way of
an academic angle, is a discussion of what else had been written in the past about the history of coal, as well as a theoretical approach. This is hardly a criticism because that really isn't the intention of this book. In fact, believe the book would have suffered had she taken this approach.
I agree with another reviewer who suggested that Freese didn't know how to end the book--although I did find her discussion of alternatives to coal to be compelling. There are two typos in the book that evaded the copy editor, but otherwise this book is a small masterpiece. You will enjoy it.
In reading this book, the reader not only gets a complete history of coal, but also information and statistics concerning coal's impact on the environment.
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