Books like A Town Called Asbestos — picked by fans

This book was released when I was starting my own work on mining history, and it greatly influenced everything I have written since. I love how LeCain traces how the demand for copper to electrify American cities led to the creation of massive holes such as the Bingham and Berkeley pits.

For me, the crux of the book is the idea that, as the quality of copper ore declined, mining companies used more energy and brute force machinery to dig unimaginably large open pits, producing landscape scars and toxic legacies that are still with us today. It makes visible the immense cost of America’s great industrial acceleration. 

I have rarely encountered a book that captures the local impacts of mining as well as Lianne Leddy’s Serpent River Resurgence. I was impressed with how the author, a Serpent River First Nation member, used oral history and family stories to document how the uranium rush at Elliot Lake, Ontario, irrevocably altered the ability of Serpent River members to hunt, fish, and gather off the land.

To me, the book's real strength was the author’s refusal to depict her fellow community members as victims, highlighting their successful campaign for environmental cleanup of the toxic legacies that remained long after the uranium mines had closed. 

This one challenged me to get out of my historian’s bubble and confront the impacts of mining in the present and near future, especially those associated with the looming energy transition. Pollon blew me away with sobering facts, such as the need to mine 3 billion tons of minerals to stay below 2 degrees of global temperature increases.

I was also captivated by the author’s accounts of his travels to the front lines of the critical minerals boom, which paint a vivid portrait of the vast scale of development associated with lithium, copper, and nickel development. Pollon’s book reminded me that technological solutions to climate change (important as they are) come with their own environmental and human costs.  

I have read a fair number of books, including Emile Zola’s famous Germinal, that depict coal miners as the helpless of a particularly horrible working-class hell.

I loved Thomas Andrews’ book because it highlights how much Colorado’s coal miners controlled their destiny. I was captivated by Andrews’ descriptions of how coal miners shaped the underground environment to enhance safety and increase their income (they were paid by the weight of ore mined rather than an hourly wage).

For me, the most fascinating part of it was Andrews’ revisionist history of the infamous Ludlow massacre of 1914, which the author argues was part of a larger shooting war where workers fought back against company guards and state militia rather than passively accept the coal companies’ efforts to control them.

In 1995, in the attic of a decommissioned mental hospital in New York State, a curator of New York State Museum, a local volunteer, a psychiatrist/ documentarian, and a photographer found a trove of suitcases, doctor’s bags, steamer trunks with Chinese motif, housekeys, photographs, earrings, belts, upright ladies Saratoga trunks (“so named because they could hold enough clothes for an entire summer season in the resort town of Saratoga Springs.")

The researchers ventured further into the hospital's now vacant sites, an abandoned bowling alley, and its burial grounds. Finally, they obtained permission to get a few hours with the medical records, which were stored in an abandoned hospital building contaminated with asbestos and lead, requiring them to don protective gear and booties.

Their hope was to bring the forgotten patients who’d spent years in the institution back to life. This book and its intricate details haunted me. There are so… show more.

Forty years after his father’s death, and now in his mid-seventies, the celebrated playwright and novelist Michael Frayn decided to write about his childhood before it vanished from his memory.

This quest into his past proved to become a powerful portrait of his father, a sales rep for an asbestos firm, and their constantly awkward relationship. He recalls with wry humour his father’s idiosyncratic behaviour – his reckless driving, his absurd penny-pinching, his ridiculous hopes for his unathletic son’s sporting abilities.

He paints a wickedly funny picture of suburban life in postwar London – a life shattered by his mother’s sudden death, an event which amazingly was never mentioned thereafter. For the author, it becomes a journey of self-discovery, during which he realises, despite his father’s many flaws, how much he has inherited from him. 

This book provides an essential introduction to the expanding field of ecological economics.

Authored by some of the leading figures in the field, it covers the basic evidence of global limits to economic activity such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. The historical basis for ecological economic theory is explained in non-technical terms.

The book covers issues of sustainable scale, natural capital, and ecosystem services – simple concepts that nonetheless revolutionize economic thinking. It concludes with an analysis of policies needed to achieve sustainability. 

Like me, David George Haskell was born in Britain, and currently lives in the United States. He is a trained scientist, who is also an astonishingly gifted writer. His focus on “sensory extinction” is close to my heart. He understands the joy of listening to the wild music of the world, and also that such music is under siege. In a world of increasing racket and distraction, he recognizes the importance of slowing down. Like Jay Griffiths, he combines deep research with an emphasis on wonder, reverence, and delight.

An oldie but a goodie, and a classic. Cronon’s lead essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” roused ‘90s environmentalism like a brilliant party crasher—but don’t miss Richard White’s “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living,” Giovanna Di Chiro’s “Nature as Community,” and, well, my own “Looking for Nature at the Mall.”

How could you not love a book that explores the at times hilarious, at times tragic, but always fascinating impact of the banana in the United States and Latin America?

From the changing faces of Chiquita Banana to cookbooks and popular jingles like, “Yes, we have no bananas!” Soluri shows us how the banana became one of the most common fruits in the US diet. At the same time, he shows how US importers and marketers took control over, manipulated, and expanded, much of the production in tropical areas like Honduras.

On the production side, Soluri explores ironies like the fact that the United Fruit Company created the perfect breeding ground for pathogens by shrinking banana gene pools and shoving the same type of banana trees all in a row... or the tragic fact that “macho” banana workers became sterile after refusing to wear protective clothing.

John Soluri’s book is… show more.