Coal: a human history / Barbara Freese

by Freese, Barbara (Barbara E.)

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Title Statements

Full title :Coal : a human history / Barbara Freese.

Summary

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).

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2003.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Perseus Pub
Place of Publication:Cambridge, MA
Language:eng
Publication Date:2003.

Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-291) and index.

The Physical Object

Description:v, 308 p., [8] p. of plates : : ill. ; : 20 cm.

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:0738204005, 9780738204000
oclc:on1342799036
LC Classification:TN800
Dewey Decimal:553.24

A portable climate -- The best stone in Britain -- Launching a revolution -- Full steam ahead -- A precious seed -- The rise and fall of King Coal -- Invisible power -- A sort of black stone -- A burning legacy.