快猫短视频

Coal: A human history by Barbara Freese, Perseus, $25, ISBN 0738204005 Reviewed by Roy Herbert

THIS is an unpretentious title for an absorbing book that never loses its grip. Barbara Freese is a splendid writer and takes the coal of the whole world into her compass. She makes even the familiar history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which depended on coal, seem fresh and its cruelties, such as the employment of children in the mines, impossible to read without new revulsion.

Coal鈥檚 social effects, including the rapid expansion of cities and pollution of the atmosphere by factory and domestic chimneys, made life for millions of people squalid and almost certainly short. As the smoke thickened, the country grew rich and acquired an empire. North America followed a similar pattern. Its colonial development was founded on wood 鈥� log cabins, so-called 鈥渃orduroy鈥� roads and wood-burning locomotives and stoves 鈥� but the discovery of vast coal beds and rock-like anthracite produced the same city sprawl and pollution as in Britain.

As late as 1913, industry was still heedless of the dangers of smoke, one Chicago coal dealer claiming that smoke in the lungs actually purified the air as it was sucked in through carbon on its way to the blood.

In China the story of coal is different because of constant civil wars, foreign interference and even invasion, but that country, too, is now suffering from air pollution caused by burning coal. In Coal Freese also has much to say about its future as a source of power and her conjectures on what world history might have been without it are fascinating.