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Coal: A Human History (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "IN THE SUMMER OF 1306, bishops and barons and knights from all around England left their country manors and villages and journeyed to London..." (more)
Key Phrases: anthracite country, choke damp, coal use, United States, New York, Molly Maguires (more...)

3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)

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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.

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

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Product Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 3rd pr edition (January 7, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0738204005
ISBN-13: 978-0738204000
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #389,209 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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› Visit Amazon's Barbara Freese Page

Inside This Book (learn more)

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

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

Victorian Cities (Classics in Urban History, No 2) 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

23 books cite this book:

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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Big Coal by Jeff Goodell

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	87% buy the item featured on this page: Coal: A Human History 3.9 out of 5 stars (34) $13.44
	5% buy Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future 4.5 out of 5 stars (42) $9.50
	4% buy Growing Up in Coal Country 4.6 out of 5 stars (8) $7.95
	2% buy Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region (PA) (Images of America) 5.0 out of 5 stars (1) $14.95

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Customer Reviews

34 Reviews

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

3.9 out of 5 stars (34 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dirty Rotten Carbon Fuels , September 4, 2004

By	Matherson (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This is a short book and, yes, it is written by a committed environmentalist. But it is also an extremely well-researched and well-structured tale, written by someone with a real understanding of the social consequences of energy consumption. "Coal" takes us to Britain, where coal had been a fuel source for centuries - leading to a plethora of genetic and medical problems, not least a slew of skin, lung and growth disorders in the cities (like London and Manchester) that burned coal in the greatest quantity. Author Freese then travels over to Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania, where the American coal-mining industry started, and plots its development - also showing us the environmental effects of heavy industrial coal usage on an old steel town such as Pittsburgh. The final chapter is devoted to the Kyoto Protocols and other worldwide efforts to reach cleaner fuels. Concise and with huge contemporary relevance.

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coal's role in chemisty neglected, September 6, 2005

By	Robert Muirhead "Bob" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

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.

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coal dust, July 3, 2003

By	Richard Giordano - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars 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 1 month ago by Kelly Langston-Smith

1.0 out of 5 stars 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 1 month ago by pamcc

5.0 out of 5 stars 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 8 months ago by caroline

4.0 out of 5 stars 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

Published 9 months ago by W. Stewart

2.0 out of 5 stars 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 14 months ago by Joel M. Kauffman

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent research, reasoning - not flashy, very solid
There is much less advocacy here than in (the terrible) Coal River or (the good) Moving Mountains, but just as much information, both scientific and historical, primarily the... Read more

Published 17 months ago by Roger D. Curry

2.0 out of 5 stars I'd only finish this if I were being graded on it.
I gave up on this book five chapters in. If I wanted to read a slow compilation of quotes from other literature about the history of coal, I'd have purchased a textbook... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Evan the Dweezil

3.0 out of 5 stars Something to learn but a tedious read
I bought this book because of its small size (only 7 x 5" and 248 pages). I thought I would learn something and I did. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Linda Linguvic

5.0 out of 5 stars Coal interesting? Sure is
Very interesting, fascinating, informative book. I learned lots from this well written, thoroughly enthralling book and gave it a well deserved 5 star rating.

Published 21 months ago by Helen Ford

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not Mary Poppins . . .
It's not Mary Poppins . . . but Coal should be a text used in our schools.

Published 24 months ago by PR

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