The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock has altered the course of history. Prized as "the best stone in Britain" by Roman invaders who carved jewelry out of it, coal has transformed societies, powered navies, fueled economies, and expanded frontiers. It made China a twelfth-century superpower, inspired the writing of the Communist Manifesto, and helped the northern states win the American Civil War.Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy-and even today powers our electrical plants-has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. As early as 1306, King Edward I tried to ban coal (unsuccessfully) because its smoke became so obnoxious. Its recent identification as a primary cause of global warming has made it a cause célèbre of a new kind.In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe. From the "Great Stinking Fogs" of London to the rat-infested coal mines of Pennsylvania, from the impoverished slums of Manchester to the toxic city streets of Beijing, Coal is a captivating narrative about an ordinary substance that has done extraordinary things-a simple black rock that could well determine our fate as a species.
Coal: A Human History
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers 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 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Deleterious to health and beneficial to wealth, coal contains a tension that makes its story a compelling one. Freese is a former attorney general of Minnesota, who became interested in the flammable rock's history during her tenure. After a routine description of coal's geological formation, Freese invigorates her narrative with its combustion in England. Even in the 1500s, its noxiousness provoked denunciation, but with Britannia's forests all but consumed, it became everybody's heat source. Freese is quite succinct in describing coal's critical role in sparking the Industrial Revolution, whose side effects included a troglodytic existence for miners and suffocating fogs for Manchester and London. The author then covers America's seduction by coal, and presently China's, culminating with her advocating reduction of coal's primary pollutants, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, and its ultimate banishment as an energy source. Freese's combination of labor and technological history is fluid and evenhanded; she is a solid inductee into the popular club of "biographers" of materials such as salt (Mark Kurlansky) and water (Philip Ball). Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I moved back to the United States after living for about 8 years in Manchester, England. Even today, you can still identify the effects of coal in Manchester--from the many chimneys around the Northern landscape, to the coal-blackened Victorian warehouses. When I bought a house there, I pulled-up carpets that covered wood floors since 1911, and I myself was covered with coal dust that accumulated over the decades. Finally, in the North of England, you still have a few coal mining villages and towns that have very strong cultures. So I was aware of coal when I lived there, and had become curious.
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.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I found this book to be well-written in a literary sense. While correctly critical of coal where justified, Freese does not descend into partisan polemic and cliche when discussing difficult issues.
The book covers nearly all the major issues that coal has faced over the centuries - including the little-recognised fact that Europe went through an energy crisis as forests were depleted before coal came into widespread use hundreds of years ago.
However, I was surprised that Freese did not cover the major role that coal played in the development of organic chemical industries based on coal liquids in the 19th century.
We owe synthetic dyes and major advances in the understanding of organic chemistry to coal liquid by-products of coke and gas making in the 19th century.
Solvents such as benzene were also first made from coal tars.
The misuse of these chemicals also led to major advances in the understanding of occupational health and epidemiology - some of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century.
The book covers nearly all the major issues that coal has faced over the centuries - including the little-recognised fact that Europe went through an energy crisis as forests were depleted before coal came into widespread use hundreds of years ago.
However, I was surprised that Freese did not cover the major role that coal played in the development of organic chemical industries based on coal liquids in the 19th century.
We owe synthetic dyes and major advances in the understanding of organic chemistry to coal liquid by-products of coke and gas making in the 19th century.
Solvents such as benzene were also first made from coal tars.
The misuse of these chemicals also led to major advances in the understanding of occupational health and epidemiology - some of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book discusses the history of coal as a two-edged sword, as both a creator and a destroyer. Freese is extraordinary in her history of coal and its impact on England, and then on how coal has impacted American history as well.
The social effects of coal consumption for the last five centuries has been immense and far-reaching -- allowing human comfort in otherwise unlivable areas, later allowing its energy to be harnessed for transportation and then electric power. That this comes at an astonishing price in terms of human lungs comes as no surprise but Freese's narrative is vivid, subtle, and convincing.
The last chapters on China and the future of coal read more anecdotally, more like a travelogue, so they seem a bit disjointed from the first part of the book. That's the cost of a shift from historical writing into contemporary issues and speculation on the future impact of coal, which I do think Freese has accomplished with measure and balance.
The social effects of coal consumption for the last five centuries has been immense and far-reaching -- allowing human comfort in otherwise unlivable areas, later allowing its energy to be harnessed for transportation and then electric power. That this comes at an astonishing price in terms of human lungs comes as no surprise but Freese's narrative is vivid, subtle, and convincing.
The last chapters on China and the future of coal read more anecdotally, more like a travelogue, so they seem a bit disjointed from the first part of the book. That's the cost of a shift from historical writing into contemporary issues and speculation on the future impact of coal, which I do think Freese has accomplished with measure and balance.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A Surprisingly Human History
I am not sure I would be aware of this remarkable book had I not had the fortune to share office space with Eric Grunebaum, one of the producers of a documentary film called "The... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Alan L. Chase
Lots of good info
Pretty interesting micro-history about coal and how it influenced (and continues to influence) history. Read more
Published 10 months ago by J. Parent
Insightful
Very insightful, and I learned a lot about commodity use (wood, coal) in London in the 1500's, as well as the start of canals and railways to carry the coal in the newly founded... Read more
Published 16 months ago by K. Jabaut
Another way to see History
Simply put, this book explains in what the world has become by stressing the importance of coal to our society. Read more
Published on March 7, 2010 by JOSE FERREIRA PINTO
easy, informative read
I really loved this book and finished it in record time. I often have trouble keeping interest in nonfiction books, especially ones about technology, but when I put it down I kept... Read more
Published on February 14, 2010 by mxt144
Coal in the Stocking of Humanity
If you approach this book hoping to get an in depth and historic view of coal as a substance that formed and shaped much of human history and culture, you will find little... Read more
Published on October 8, 2009 by Kelly Langston-Smith
Fact, Fantasy, Fiction....which is it?
After struggling toooo long with this book...I question the authors intent. She compiles little facts with lots of her own beliefs and opinions... Read more
Published on October 8, 2009 by pamcc
amazingly interesting book on coal- who would have thought?
Very easy read and more interesting than you would have thought. It was a coffee table book at my in-laws house that I picked up and ended up taking home with me. Read more
Published on February 23, 2009 by caroline
Good, but skip the pages of environmentalist drivel
This was a well written, well researched book, except for the few pages that diverged into the global warming debate.
The history presented was well done. Read more
The history presented was well done. Read more
Published on January 11, 2009 by The Bear
Lawyer Looks at Climate "Science"
In agreement with Donald B. Siano's review of 23 Feb 04, I felt that this book was written as a rant against the use of coal, much of it warranted, but not all. Read more
Published on August 16, 2008 by Joel M. Kauffman
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
IN THE SUMMER OF 1306, bishops and barons and knights from all around England left their country manors and villages and journeyed to London. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
anthracite country, choke damp, coal use, anthracite miners, anthracite region, coal plants, coal trade, cheap iron, coal smoke Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, New York, Molly Maguires, Royal Society, King Coal, Summit Hill, Western Fuels, West Virginia, Civil War, George Stephenson, James Watt, North America, Kyoto Protocol, Great Britain, John Graunt, Lehigh River, Necho Allen, River Tyne, White House, Acid Rain Program, Centennial Exhibition, Department of Energy, Great Leap Forward, Inner Mongolia, Marco Polo New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
IN THE SUMMER OF 1306, bishops and barons and knights from all around England left their country manors and villages and journeyed to London. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
anthracite country, choke damp, coal use, anthracite miners, anthracite region, coal plants, coal trade, cheap iron, coal smoke Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, New York, Molly Maguires, Royal Society, King Coal, Summit Hill, Western Fuels, West Virginia, Civil War, George Stephenson, James Watt, North America, Kyoto Protocol, Great Britain, John Graunt, Lehigh River, Necho Allen, River Tyne, White House, Acid Rain Program, Centennial Exhibition, Department of Energy, Great Leap Forward, Inner Mongolia, Marco Polo New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
See all 100 books this book cites
23
books
cite this book:
See all 23 books citing this book
- Victorian Cities (Classics in Urban History) by Asa Briggs on 4 pages
- The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World's Steam Age by Asa Briggs in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Coal Mining: 91044th quarter by Great Britain in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Industrial Revolution (Reading History) by Pat Hudson in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Life of George Stephenson by Samuel Smiles in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 100 books this book cites
- The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery on 4 pages
- The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery on 4 pages
- Crude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy by Alfred W. Crosby on page 70, and Back Matter
- Crude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 23 books citing this book
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