An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal [Hardcover]

Andrew Schneider (Author), David McCumber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2004

The horrifying true story of the decades-long poisoning of a small town and the definitive exposé of asbestos in America-told by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who broke it.

In a valley in Montana, the U.S. has spent millions of dollars removing toxic residue from a town that had lain pristine for ages. Until the last century, when the dust came down like a snowstorm. That dust turned a paradise into the worst of America's killing fields, a name at the top of the list that includes Love Canal and Woburn. A place now known to be deadlier than all the rest: Libby.

An Air That Kills is told through the eyes of the men and women who fought back-among them, a woman who watched more than forty members of her family succumb to asbestos; a miner who worked there and carried the poison home; and an EPA investigator who battled not only one of the world's most powerful corporations but also his superiors in Washington. It is the first book to reveal how deeply asbestos has embedded itself into the texture of America: how many people have died or are dying; how the industry and government repeatedly ignored the danger; and how, for many Americans, the dying is not over. It is a suspense story with real American heroes at its heart and one of the most importants works of environmental journalism in years.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As part of a year-long investigation into the impact of the General Mining Act, which let corporations buy land cheaply from the government, Schneider, senior national correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, met with Gayla Benefield, a resident and activist in Libby, Mont. Benefield's extensive knowledge of the area and the number of people suffering from asbestos-related illnesses impressed Schneider. He began his own digging, talking to lawyers, residents, environmental experts and staffers at the EPA, and even had tests conducted. This book chronicles his inquiry into an enormous coverup by Grace Corporation, which ran the Zonolite factory. Schneider and McCumber, managing editor at the newspaper, have written a compelling and frightening story about the victims-the people who worked in the factory and other local residents who weren't employees-suffering from life-threatening ailments. The authors focus on the individuals rather than the legal wrangling, court cases or scientific research. For example, in describing the matter-of-fact way employees handled the asbestos dust, they compellingly write: "Each floor was worse than the last. Les' battle with the never-ending blizzard of dust was truly mythical in proportion, like Hercules cleaning the Augean stables.... When he got on the bus to ride back to town that night, he was covered in dust, just like everybody else. His hair was coated, his ears and his nose were plugged up. His throat felt like sandpaper. The dust in his mouth and nose felt like thick brown syrup...." With Benefield-who's reminiscent of Erin Brockovich-at the center of the story, the authors have written a first-rate book about a contemporary American tragedy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* News media take a lot of criticism these days, often deservedly, but sometimes the fourth estate comes to our aid when all other institutions fail. Here, Schneider and McCumber build on the story they broke in 1999 for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Vermiculite miners in remote Libby, Montana, were dying. Worse, their spouses and children were dying, too. Vermiculite is used in construction materials, insulation, gardening, and elsewhere. The vermiculite found in Libby is contaminated with tremolite, a particularly lethal form of asbestos, which dusted the workers and the town and which companies Zonolite and W. R. Grace said was harmless. This is a tale of chilling employer cynicism, of government collusion, and, fortunately, of an alert reporter, a committed community activist, and an EPA worker who fought his own agency to do what was right. Still, Libby's environmental catastrophe is worse than Love Canal's--and because asbestos still hasn't been banned, citizens weren't and won't be the only ones to suffer. In this remarkable book, the authors construct a rich, compelling narrative that includes both hard science and touching stories. Schneider and McCumber have clearly chosen a side, but to take the other is to value money over human life. An essential entry in the annals of corporate amorality. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons (January 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399150951
• ISBN-13: 978-0399150951
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tragic story, February 10, 2004

By 

Gayla Benefield (Libby, MT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal (Hardcover)

As one of the characters in the book, I am grateful to Andrew Schneider and David McCumber for portraying what has happened to Libby, Montana and its residents so thoughtfully and thoroughly.

The book is a "must read" for everyone.

The story is far from over in Libby and around the country, but if what has occured in Libby serves as a lesson to other communities, it will be worth it.

People can make a difference, if they don't give up and are surrounded by people that believe in them.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What one newspaper said, February 12, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal (Hardcover)

Review: 'Air That Kills' exposes fibers of mass destruction

Reviewed by Neal Karlen

Special to the Star Tribune

Just because you're paranoid about the environment doesn't mean they're not out to poison you. So we learn in spellbinding, horrific detail in Andrew Schneider and David McCumber's "An Air That Kills," a jeremiad that does for the still-immediate peril of asbestos what Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" did for the Corvair.

Of course, that sports car could simply be pulled out of production. Yet where does one even begin to deal with the ongoing fallout of generations worth of systemic, unregulated poisoning of our country by an industry that churned out uncountable tons of fibers of mass destruction, in a business most people wrongly think was brought to its knees around the time young Dubya was pledging Skull and Bones at Yale?

Schneider (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes) and McCumber center their exposé on Libby, a small town in the northwest corner of Montana that was mined from the 1920s to 1990 for asbestos-laden vermiculite ore, known commercially as Zonolite. W.R. Grace & Co., which bought the mine in 1963 and ramped up production, hid the risks of the toxic dust that by 1969 was being released into Libby's air at the rate of 2 1/2 tons a day.

It would be bad enough if the astronomical fatality rates of asbestos-related cancers had been localized in Libby. Unfortunately, Grace had sent billions of pounds of its tainted ore to more than 750 processing plants throughout North America, including two in Minneapolis; it's estimated that between 15 million and 35 million homes remain insulated with the product that the company always contended wasn't hazardous. Minneapolis alone received more than 192 million pounds of the poison over the years.

Schneider and McCumber pile conspiracy upon conspiracy, and if their evidence wasn't so compelling, one would think they were talking of Dealey Plaza and gunmen on the grassy knoll. Yet here it all is, up to and including the Bush White House blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's declaration of a public-health emergency in April 2002, as well as the attached warning to millions of citizens that they still might be exposed.

The authors wisely focus not just on deciphering the meaning of the wealth of related secret corporate and governmental memos they unearthed, but on the faces, names and particulars of the suffering. Take Les Skramstad, who worked at Grace's Libby mine for just three years in the 1950s, and got hit with asbestosis in 1995.

"It's hard to sleep when your lungs aren't pliable enough to breathe in the air needed to live," they write. Les's wife "Norita gets even less sleep worrying about him. When he finally lies still, she lies there listening to hear that he's still breathing. His breaths are so shallow that she can barely feel his chest rise."

As to why he refuses bottled help, he tells the authors: "Dragging a tank of air behind you is like admitting that you're dying. Everybody I know who started on oxygen died a few months later. It's like giving in to Grace and saying 'yeah, you killed another one.' "

It gets worse. Yet despite the revulsion one feels reading of the calculated destruction of a once-beautiful town that now makes Love Canal seem like a pristine Big Sur, Schneider and McCumber have woven a galvanizing, human tale as entrancing as it is loathsome.

Minneapolis author Neal Karlen's sixth book, "Unchosen," a religious memoir about returning to faith, will be published in October.
© Copyright 2004 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Actually, a Real Page-Turner. This book deserves to be read!, May 8, 2004

By 

Jon Eisen "joneisen" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana Uncovered a National Scandal (Hardcover)

I want you to read this book. It is important to you and your family. I consider myself a knowledgeable person and I don't remember this scandal when it came out in 2000-2001. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I live in southern CA, but the problems with asbestos effects all of us in the US. Attic insulation, talc products and even gardening/soil products have asbestos risks that have been used and available for sale up into the 1990's and beyond.

I must have read a review or heard one of the authors in an interview...but somehow this book made it onto my "Must Read" list. When I received the book, I questioned why I had gotten it, having forgotten what motivated my interest in the first place. But I started reading and have found this book to be a treasure.

The story is one of deception, corruption and greed on the part of Big Business, in this case the mining business. The owners and executives misled their workers, investors and the government agencies that regulated them into turning a blind eye to the dangers of asbestos in their products.

While the deception of the miners in Libby was unconscionable, the book goes on to document the Bush White House withholding information that the air in and around the World Trade Center was not healthy! Can you imagine, after a tragedy like the WTC disaster, that your own government, that you rallied round to give support, would turn on you and withhold information that the air that you breathe is full of cancer causing dust? Which tragedy is worse?

The book is truly a must-read.

Lastly, I want to point out the courage of the reporters, editors, doctors and the outstanding EPA field workers that fought to get this story out. Whistle-blowers, whose main motivation is to right a wrong, are oftentimes rewarded by getting fired and branded as outcasts. This book is ultimately a story of courage and perserverance of those determined to overcome the obstacles of standing out and doing what's right.