Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I really am trying to encourage books to leave my house–or at least, the books that aren’t worth keeping or aren’t mine.  Barbara Freese’s Coal:  A Human History falls into the latter category; I borrowed it from my in-laws ages ago, got far enough into it not to want to give up on it, and then, well, life happened.  (Pregnancy and newborns and toddlers are ALL death to the ability to concentrate.)  Luckily, my fabulous hubby found it on audio for me, and between listening to it while exercising/doing housework and following along with the statistics in the hard copy that’s been sitting on my shelf, I finally managed to finish it.  More than that, I concentrated on it well enough that I’m now fairly bursting with knowledge about the history of coal–huzzah!  (I’d be a riot at parties, if I actually went to any.)

The thing is, coal’s history really IS fascinating.  Coal was a catalyst for and the major contributor to much of the industrialization our world has seen, and we still get more than fifty percent of our electricity from it.  (That surprised me.)  Sadly, it’s also a major contributor to our world’s pollution levels, and the solutions to that problem are complicated.  (For many reasons, by the way.  A few weeks ago I would have assumed that coal was coal, if I’d thought about it at all.  Now I know something about the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal, eastern and western coal and their respective sulfur contents–the things I never knew I never knew!)  I enjoyed the history more than the contemporary analysis, partly because problems that have no clear solution make me anxious and partly because I love history (that is, after all, why I borrowed the book from my father-in-law in the first place).  I don’t necessarily quibble with the trajectory of Freese’s history, you understand; I just enjoyed the main section of the book most.

Bottom line?  This is a fascinating read, although it’s by nature a dryer sort of nonfiction.  If you enjoy history and/or information–or you have secret yearnings to know more about coal–give this one a try.