Holy cow. Coal is grosser than I thought. This little book certainly didn't cover everything, but I learned quite a bit.

Richie's Picks: COAL: A HUMAN HISTORY by Barbara Freese, Perseus, February 2003, ISBN 0-7382-0400-5
It's a complicated yet amazing game: Life on Earth:

A bug sat in a silver flower
thinking silver thoughts.
A bigger bug out for a walk
climbed up that silver flower stalk
and snapped the small bug down his jaws
without a pause
without a care
for all the bug's small silver thoughts.
It isn't right
it isn't fair
that big bug ate that little bug
because that little bug was there.

He also ate his underwear.

--Karla Kuskin

"Like living solar collectors handily dispersed all over the planet, plants capture sunshine as it arrives and convert it into chemical energy that animals can eat...Animals eating plants take that stored energy into their bodies, where they not only store it in concentrated form but disperse it through space. A flock of geese, a pod of whales, a herd of caribou--they are all, on some level, mobile battery-packs. They gather solar energy that falls upon one patch of the planet and deliver it to another as they migrate; in this way, they make life possible for their predators even when, for example, the snow is thick and there is not a green leaf in sight. Life on earth is, in short, a vast and sophisticated system for capturing, converting, storing, and moving solar energy, the evolutionary success of each species depending in significant part on how well it taps into that system...In the animal kingdom, one of the species that can most efficiently turn the calories of its food into useful mechanical energy is our own...Our metabolisms are astonishingly energy-efficient, and that undoubtedly gave us an evolutionary advantage over other species. Perhaps this advantage helped give us the big brains we needed to figure out yet another way to tap into the stream of solar income captured by plants: fire."

Now fast-forward a half-million years, from that point when Early Man learned to control fire, to a time when many men have learned to dig and burn a portion of that stream of solar income which was trapped underground in the form of big black lumps:

"By 1700, a book called City Gardener had been written; it listed the types of plants thought hardy enough to survive coal smoke 'so that everybody in London or other cities where coal was burnt might delight themselves in the pleasures of gardening.' "

Barbara Freese has written a thoroughly entertaining and enlightening book about coal and its entanglement with human life. It is SO difficult for me to pick just a few snippets to share. Within just the first few dozen pages we learn about those plants (existing before the dinosaurs) which became the coal. We learn about prehistoric continental drift of the British Isles. We learn why the Church owned all the coals in Newcastle--until Henry VIII came along--despite the evilness attributed to coal by the Church. Further on, we hear the story of two guys out fishing in a boat when the river they're on breaks through its bed to a mine, leaving the fish high and dry!

I'd love to have been Barbara's research partner in school! Having mined hundreds of disparate sources to yield multidisciplinary facts--scientific, historic, cultural, political, economic, and literary--she has melded this great wealth of information into a book filled with connections that is rich enough to easily center an entire semester's study around, yet as readable as a good magazine piece. Her three settings for examination of humans and coal are Britain, America, and China.

"The lives of factory workers in Manchester, and in the other new industrial cities rising up around Britain, were shaped by the burning of coal just as the coal miners' lives were shaped by the digging of it. Coal made the iron that built the machines the workers operated as well as the factories they worked in, and then it provided the power that made the machines and factories run. Coal gas provided the lights the workers toiled under, letting their work day start before dawn and end after dusk. When they left the factory doors, they would walk through a city made of coal-fired bricks, now stained black with the same coal soot that was soiling their skin and clothes. Looking up, they would see a sky darkened by coal smoke; looking down, a ground blackened by coal dust. When they went home, they would eat food cooked over a coal fire and often tainted with a coal flavor, and with each breath, they would inhale some of the densest coal smoke on the planet. In short, their world was constructed, animated, illuminated, colored, scented, flavored, and generally saturated by coal and the fruits of its combustion."

Manchester, immersed in coal, was one of the major cities at the center of a revolution. Britain rose to rule the world, thanks to the industrialization fired up with her coal, and so, thereafter, did the United States, ascending in its turn courtesy of old King Coal. The author reveals how it was inevitable that the coal-rich Yankees would defeat the coal-poor Rebels, for all those resources that meant strength in war were rooted in a superior coal supply. While exploring the history of coal in the US, Ms. Freese touches on such subjects as how coal saved the last of the whales, how coal fired up unionization, and how coal created canals, birthed railroads, and was thus responsible for settling the West. But with the progress came the smoke and soot.

Attempts to clear the air began in the nineteenth century:

"It was generally understood that merely aesthetic objections to smoke and soot were insufficient to warrant interference with something so vital to the nation as coal burning, so the impact of smoke on health became the focus of most activists. Unfortunately...belief that smoke had antiseptic properties still lingered; indeed, the era's tight focus on germs and epidemics, which had motivated cities to spend vast sums on water and sewage projects, made smoke seem safe by comparison. As late as 1913, when Birmingham steel mills pressed the city to repeal its new smoke abatement law, a physician supported their case, pointing out that smoke could not possibly be harmful because, having been purified by fire, it did not carry germs. A Chicago coal dealer defending against smoke abatement efforts had gone even further when, in 1892, he argued that the black carbon deposited by smoke in the lungs actually purified the air as it passed through the carbon and into the blood."

The author brings us forward to the currently existing threats to the health of US citizens (and to the long term sustainability of the planet). American households and factories have long since moved away from burning coal, but it remains the primary fuel for generating the nation's electricity. Freese explains recent political debates, and introduces us to a coal executive who touts the benefits of doubling or tripling the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Then we leap to China, a third country with rich coal deposits and a rich history of exploiting those resources. Far ahead of the West in utilizing coal when we look back to past millennia, the author shows how Mao's Great Leap Forward set them quite a few paces backward as a result of trying to literally turn industrialization into a backyard industry. During the late 1950s:

"Peasants, factory workers, doctors, and schoolchildren tried to help meet the party's steel production targets. (Actually, they were mostly trying to produce pig iron, which would theoretically be turned into steel at steel works.) As many as a hundred million Chinese--roughly twice the entire population of Great Britain, the nation whose steel production they were trying to top--were feverishly employed in the feeding and tending of an estimated 1 to 2 million little furnaces, some of them built in a matter of hours.
"In putting the masses to work in this way, Mao had overlooked many things, including the huge amounts of coal that steel production requires...By the end of 1958, by one estimate, some 100,000 coal pits were in operation, worked by some 20 million peasants."

Freese traveled to China while researching this book, visiting current mining and power production facilities, and she is able to report on the real leaps forward in productivity and efficiency that were achieved as a result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. On the other hand, she also details how China, which in recent years has laid claim to half of the world's ten most polluted cities, is currently responsible for significant levels of air pollution migrating to North America. From the facts she lays out, it is clear that the US and China must both cooperate with other industrialized nations if any plan to counter global warming and mitigate rising levels of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide is to succeed.

Having utilized centuries' worth of source materials for this project, the author includes thirty pages of notes, detailing exactly where she's found each of the book's quotes and anecdotes. The combination of these notes with her bibliography guides readers toward any source materials they may wish to examine.

Barbara Freese weaves all of these aspects of coal and life on earth into an attention-grabbing tapestry. COAL: A HUMAN HISTORY is both a captivating read and a book of major importance for young adults whose futures and those of their children may literally sink or swim depending upon the mercy of Mother Nature and the long term effects of crucial energy decisions people are making today in countries around the world.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com ( )

I learned some fairly interesting things about coal. However, I felt like I was being lectured to from an environmental approach. I am all in favor of clean air and water, and would love to see industry as a whole take a more eco-friendly approach, but I also like electricity. ( )

Pros: good coverage
Cons: not very interesting writing; not much original materials ( )

This is an incredibly well-written, comprehensive book about the history of coal and its effect on the environment throughout the world. From the ancient Romans to the post-industrial age, the reader is taken on all-encompassing journey throughout the history of coal. Having just returned from a short trip to Pittsburgh, I found the historical information about coal mining in that area quite interesting. Of course, having no background whatsoever in this industry, the author's writing was very persuasive to a neophyte such as myself. Extremely thought-provoking and highly recommended. ( )