Coal River | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Shnayerson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 59013
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0374125147
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.272409754
EAN: 9780374125141
ASIN: 0374125147
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
One of America’s most dramatic environmental battles is unfolding in southern West Virginia. Coal companies are blasting the mountains, decapitating them for coal. The forested ridge tops and valley streams of Appalachia—one of the country’s natural treasures—are being destroyed, along with towns and communities. An entire culture is disappearing, and to this day, most Americans have no idea it’s happening. Michael Shnayerson first traveled to the coal fields four years ago, on assignment for Vanity Fair. There he met an inspiring young lawyer named Joe Lovett, who was fighting mountaintop removal in court with a series of brilliant and daring lawsuits. He also met Judy Bonds, whose grassroots group, the Coal River Mountain Watch, was speaking out in a region where talking truth to power was both brave and dangerous. The two had joined forces to take on Massey Energy, the largest and most aggressive of the coal companies, and its swaggering, notorious chairman, Don Blankenship. Coal River is Shnayerson’s account of this dramatic struggle. From courtroom to boardroom, forest clearing to factory floor, Shnayerson gives us a novelistic and compelling portrait of the people who risked their reputations and livelihoods in the fight against King Coal.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Excellent and Gripping August 19, 2008
Amazing book. It's very heartening to see that the work of a few concerned people in Appalacia made a difference. This book really illustrated the battle between the people and Massey Energy. Really opened my eyes to the disgusting corporate greed displayed by this company. With coal and oil companies making billions in profit, is it worth destroying land, sickening children, polluting air, and allowing mine workers to work obscene shifts and in dangerous conditions for the company to get a few more dollars?
Some say this book is biased. I say it's hard not to be biased when looking at what these companies are doing. Destroying the environment, destroying unions, and destroying lives is simply unacceptable, and it's good to see a story about the little guys winning at least one small battle against this nasty corporate giant.
 Noise which dilutes legitimate discourse about damage to Appalachia May 25, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
As a committed conservationist, I really, really want to give Coal River a positive review. No can do. I tend to simplify (oversimplify?) the issues in a case. In that vein, I have carefully distilled the teaching of Coal River.:
1 - Mountaintop removal/valley fill mining (in the industry, MTM/VF) is raping Mother West Virginia. God is angry. (By the book's third sentence, we see such mining as "cancerous growths.")
2 - Our collective stunningly glutinous appetite for cheap energy has nothing to do with that.
3 - It's all "notorious," "the most hated man in the state" (Massey Coal CEO) Don Blankenship's fault, and his mother's fault, too.
Well, you gotta give Shnayerson credit, he does have remarkable clarity of vision, if you are into philippics. Perhaps, though, reason could support abolition or restriction of MTM/VF. From Shaynerson, we'll never know. Coal River contains some solid scientific information which can be useful in determining environmental and energy policy, in determining the trade-offs society seems to be willing to make (which Shnayerson detests) to provide cheap energy. That information is buried so deeply in lofty prose that it's lost. He includes passages on some basic (but largely unexplained) concepts of West Virginia's remarkable diversity of flora species, basic (but largely unexplained) processes & structures of streams, ponds and watersheds, (largely unexplained, speculative and anecdotal) health effects of coal production, and (largely unexplained) factors which make the coal available for MTM/VF mining chemically desirable and economically attractive.
Shnayerson refers to the "war against coal" (p. 291) and agrees with the view that "the world would have to stop burning coal, period." (P. 292). The author savages part of the West Virginia Supreme Court (particularly Justices Maynard and Benjamin and, to a slightly lesser extent, Justice Davis), the entire corrupt West Virginia political system, faux-plaintiff lawyers who can be "bought off," Don Blankenship's "attempted putsch" in the 2006 election, teachers, the "rotundness" of a judge, the Corps of Engineers, the DEP, coal company "security goons," the Governor, and everyone else who doesn't agree with his shrillness. He plays right into the Right's "activist judge" tirades by lamenting that a Court did not consider "the question of whether mountaintop coal mining is useful, desirable, or wise," a question which a Court is constitutionally not permitted to answer. He expresses chagrin at the preference for physical markers in metes & bounds descriptions, a concept as old as surveys.
This kind of discussion adds very little to intelligent discourse about jobs, the massive energy and heat that we produce, or the environmental prices that we are knowingly paying and unknowingly foisting upon our heirs. Strip mines are ugly as hell. Make that Hell. So are chemical plants, interstate highways, strip malls and (this is a minority view) Glade Springs. For that matter, in the 17th Century, Manhattan was a bucolic wooded island with streams and wonderful biodiversity. Look what we have now.
Consider the book itself. Fossil fuels cut the pulpwood, transported it to a mill, made the paper, powered the computer which wrote the book, cultivated and processed the cotton fibers in the paper and binding, provided feedstock for the plastics in the binding, delivered the book, and even powered my reading lamp. The national electric grid is connected. Half of all electricity is produced by burning coal. Around half of coal production comes from surface mines, including MTM/VF mining. Neither Shnayerson (nor anyone cited by him) will admit that WE are the ones who have created the demand for coal and, indeed, created and empowered Don Blankenship. By the way, I'm not kidding, Shnayerson blames Don Blankenship's mother:
[Blankenship's mother] had a work ethic that wouldn't slow down. . . . From her, Don learned that he would have to work for everything he wanted and work very, very hard. There was a dark side to this lesson, however. Don's mother would point out the town drunk to her children or criticize a customer's sloppy dress after he left the store. Anyone who didn't meet [her] high moral standards deserved to be scorned. Anyone who didn't work as hard as she did deserved to fail. Sympathy appeared to play no part in her reckonings. People got the lot they deserved and that was that."
Hey, I've never met Don Blankenship. For all I know, he's the Energy Grendel. Or maybe he's a Boy Scout among industrialists, I don't know. But picking on his MOTHER? You gotta be kidding me.
Captain Reality says that we aren't abandoning coal anytime soon. How can we improve it, and live with it? Coal River has no clue.
 Coal Rver tells the truth April 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just finished reading Michael Schnayerson's Coal River. Wow! What an expose! This work of nonfiction reads almost like a novel. The cast of characters is headed by the hulking, somewhat reclusive, brilliant, but sadistically insane Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy. Blankenship's egotistic darkness is opposed by an army of soldiers of the light, whose efforts to offset the workings of the unholy prince have not always been very effective. These soldiers would include lawyer Joe Lovett, the environmental group "Coal River Mountain Watch," environmental activists Julia "Judy" Bonds, Bo Webb, Sarah and Vernon Haltom, Patty Sebok, Freda Williams, Janice Nease, Hilary Hosta, Ed Wiley, Larry Gibson, and many others.
Blankenship is aided in his drive to extract all of the Coal River area's coal wealth by a corrupt cast of characters and government organizations. Among these are Bill Raney, President of the West Virginia Coal Association, the Mining Health and Safety Administration (MSHA), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Brent Benjamin--Massey's newly-purchased Supreme-Court Justice of the state of West Virginia, and many other doers of evil works.
Blankenship's "A.T. Massey Coal Company," known these days as Massey Energy is responsible for an almost unprecedented destruction of environment and of people in their quest to extract the last dollar's worth of coal. They have destroyed mountains, poisoned water and dried it up, fouled the air, and alienated a large portion of the population of the Coal River area.
Even the workers employed by Massey are not exempt from the draconian policies of big coal's prince of darkness. Schnayerson details the life-shattering experiences of several workers, who Massey Energy regards as just tools. In the view of Massey Energy, if a tool breaks or is marginally useful, get rid of it and get a new tool. One of the ways Massey Energy saves money is by getting rid of workers before they get to the age at which they can retire from the company. In that way, no money gets wasted on retirement benefits.
I recommend Coal River to anyone who has ever suspected there was collusion between big business and government to maximize profits, no matter what the cost to the environment or to the people. Coal River gives a revealing look into an area and a people subjected to the unashamed, unbridled exploitation of the area along Route 3 of Raleigh County of West Virginia.
hard to put down March 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The pace of this book is as fast and compulsive as a wicked thriller, but the story happens to be completely true. Shnayerson is a natural spinner and he totally delivers the goods with this tale of good versus evil. The bad guy is the morally autistic coal baron, Don Blankenship, recently selected by Old Trout magazine as the "seventh scariest person in America." He even looks like a villain -- black mustache, lifeless stare -- and spouts social Darwinist cliches while turning tens of thousands of acres of West Virginia's beautiful mountain into a moonscape. Enabling this sociopath are his lawyers, the spineless bureaucrats in various state agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers, some of the most venal judges in America, and the craven policies of the Bush Administration.
On the other side of the moral ledger are some amazing people. Injured miners who took huge risks in fighting back. Blankenship's abused maid, who dared to stand up to him. A tenacious, underpaid lawyer named Joe Lovett. Gutsy activists like Judy Bonds, Vivian Stockman, and Ed Wiley.
If you think modern life lacks drama, check out this book. There's a real war going on in the mountains of Appalachia -- and, of course, the climate implications of that war will affect the world our grandchildren inhabit. Way to go, Shnayerson, for going to West Virginia and bringing us back this story.
Fascinating but depressing too March 12, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is very well written and is an easy read. I was surprised that other than the cover photo, there are no photographs in the book documenting the horrific rape of the environment. The EPA, gutted by Bush, the state governors, senators and congressmen of WV and Tenn, and the Corps of Engineers should all be ashamed of their complicity in allowing this to happen. This is capitalism at its worst.
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