Gary Tiedemann narrates in a flat, deliberate manner that honors the seriousness of this topic: the decades-long battle to secure benefits for those afflicted with black lung disease. The fraught journey to get fair treatment for coal miners focuses on several cases in West Virginia. Tiedemann’s uninflected narration draws out the long, frustrating legal maneuvers. There are heroes and villains aplenty. Author Hamby uncovers the maddening history as lawyer John Cline, who did not begin his practice until his mid-50s, fights tirelessly against the coal companies and their unscrupulous counsel, succeeding in the end. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

★ 05/04/2020

New York Times reporter Hamby debuts with a harrowing and cinematic account of the resurgence of black lung disease among coal miners in central Appalachia. According to Hamby, the disease killed 10,000 American miners between 1995 and 2004, while only 300 died during the same time period in cave-ins and other “singular mine catastrophes” that received much more media coverage. A 1969 law limiting the amount of coal dust allowed in mine air and establishing a federal program to administer workers’ compensation and medical benefits to disabled miners should have “virtually eliminated” the illness, Hamby writes, but weakened unions, roll-backs of safety standards, and aggressive cost-cutting measures by coal company executives led to its reemergence in a “nasty new form.” Hamby centers his story on West Virginia lawyer John Cline and his client Gary Fox, who returned to work after losing a previous federal benefits claim for advanced-stage black lung disease. Readers will cheer for Cline as he unravels the systematic corporate, medical, and legal malfeasance that prevented Fox and other miners from receiving their rightful benefits, and helps push the federal Labor Department to take action in 2016 to prevent coal companies from continuing to sabotage the claims process. This eloquent and sobering reminder of the human damage caused by the coal industry deserves to be widely read. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. (Aug.)

"In Soul Full of Coal Dust, Hamby employs dogged investigative work and a deep well of empathy for his subjects to painstakingly bring this private pathos to life...With thorough reporting, and boundless concern for his subjects, Hamby has created a powerful document of this drama, one that is unfolding, largely unseen, in the hills and valleys of West Virginia.”
 —Hector Tobar, The New York Times Book Review

“Lively and arduously researched. There are many surprising revelations in Hamby’s book. With relentless curiosity and empathy, Hamby has reached deep into Appalachia’s coal hills and discovered the bright places where change occurs. Here he has found dramas of heroism, self-sacrifice and determination. With his latest work, he has performed another public service by portraying the often-forgotten people of coal country as active agents in their own history.”
 —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Hamby has delivered… extending and enriching his reporting on the West Virginia miners with advanced-stage black lung on the brink of poverty who teamed up with his idealistic lawyer to wage battle against the coal industry. Beyond courtrooms and mines, Hamby journeys deep into hollows and homes and powerfully evokes the injustices done to miners who “battled breathlessness to make it from their front porches to their mailboxes and dragged oxygen tanks wherever they went.”
 —The National Book Review

"An important story told with care and eloquence, Soul Full of Coal Dust will have you rooting for its underdog heroes and shaking your head — and maybe even your fist — at the coal barons and their hired guns who for decades" manipulated a rigged system to deprive injured miners of simple justice."—DanFagin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Toms River

"A devastating and essential indictment of corruption in coal country."—Laurence Leamer, author of The Price of Justice

"There are two kinds of cruelty. One you see on a face, and in the actions of a particular person. The other you can't see unless, like Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Chris Hamby, you uncover a hidden system-in this case of corrupt West Virginia mine company officials, paid-off lawyers, and lying doctors who deny ill miners and widows recompense for unnecessary suffering and death from black lung. It's a riveting David and Goliath story, close up and personal, and illuminating the heroic tenacity it took two men to win a hugely important fight."—Arlie RussellHochschild, author of Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourningon the American Right, a National Book Award finalist

“Soul Full of Coal Dust is a revelatory David versus Goliath story, this wondrous layering of history with a present-day bare-knuckles fight for justice. Chris Hamby has pulled off an astonishing feat of investigative journalism, one that left me rooting for these hard-bitten coal miners as they take on the unmoored greed of the coal companies and their minions.”
 —Alex Kotlowitz, author of An American Summer, the winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

“Under the double pressures of the climate crisis and our increasingly polarized political landscape, coal miners are often stereotyped as symbols of all that’s wrong with the nation. Through an intimate journey into the lives of miners suffering the horrific ravages of black lung, Hamby calculates the cost of a pressing scourge, and restores humanity and dignity to a group of American workers who have given their lives for American power.”
 —Eliza Griswold, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Amity and Prosperity

“A devastating and essential indictment of corruption in coal country.”
 —Laurence Leamer, author of The Price of Justice

“Harrowing and cinematic … This eloquent and sobering reminder of the human damage caused by the coal industry deserves to be widely read.”
 —Publishers Weekly starred review

“Hamby’s research is extensive, and his investment in revealing the plight of
the miners and their families in the hope of reform is clear.”
 —Booklist

07/01/2020

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Hamby has compiled years of research into his story of coal miners in Appalachia who have endured black lung disease, and of their struggles to secure benefits from coal companies whose purposely hijacked safety procedures had led to their disability. (His prize-winning series of articles was originally published in 2013 as Breathless and Burdened by the Center for Public Integrity.) A law enacted in 1969 was supposed to control the coal and silica dust that, when inhaled, leads to black lung. Coal companies, however, found many ways to subvert the law, from rigging the dust-collection systems to ensure clean samples, to working with high-powered lawyers to make sure miners were denied benefits once they became disabled. Hamby uses ailing miners, their advocates, and the high-powered law firms and coal companies they battled to illustrate his David and Goliath story. The villains of the tale are Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship; the prestigious West Virginia law firm of Jackson Kelly; and physician Paul Wheeler of Johns Hopkins, who interpreted miners' medical scans. The hero is the miners' legal advocate, John Cline. VERDICT An engrossing read for those interested in social justice.—Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

Gary Tiedemann narrates in a flat, deliberate manner that honors the seriousness of this topic: the decades-long battle to secure benefits for those afflicted with black lung disease. The fraught journey to get fair treatment for coal miners focuses on several cases in West Virginia. Tiedemann’s uninflected narration draws out the long, frustrating legal maneuvers. There are heroes and villains aplenty. Author Hamby uncovers the maddening history as lawyer John Cline, who did not begin his practice until his mid-50s, fights tirelessly against the coal companies and their unscrupulous counsel, succeeding in the end. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

2020-04-13
An investigative reporter takes on big coal in a tangled account of the battle for justice for miners stricken with lung disease.

In 2011, while working as a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, Hamby often came into the orbit of “factory workers, men and women who’d lost loved ones in accidents, or survivors whose lives had been forever altered” by some malfeasance or another on the part of the bosses. Nowhere was this truer than in coal mining, where fires, cave-ins, and other occupational hazards were ever present but where the greater toll came in the form of lung disease. Countless lawsuits have been filed to obtain compensation for affected workers and, more often, their widows. However, as the author writes, “companies would rather spend stacks of cash fighting each case to the bitter end than pay the modest benefits to their former employees.” It was up to “a small but scrappy coalition” of crusading attorneys, labor organizers, health care professionals, and citizen advocates to piece together evidence proving a pattern of deception: Coal companies would convince willing politicians (Donald Trump among them) that environmental regulations were too burdensome, commission doctors to cast doubt on miners’ claims for compensation, and engage in other evasions. In the end, as the roster of victims of pulmonary illnesses grew as the decades passed, that coalition finally managed to push through legislation at the national level that, among other things, “would allow attorneys to collect partial fees as the claim progressed, rather than having to wait years for an uncertain payday at its conclusion,” and made provisions for retesting of miners whose claims had been denied due to suspect medical claims on the part of the coal companies. Hamby’s book is a touch long but full of memorable moments; it sits well in the tradition of advocacy journalism that includes recent books such as Carl Safina’s A Sea in Flamesand Karen Piper’s Left in the Dust.

A solid contribution to the literature of resource extraction and its discontents.