A Town Called Asbestos

Robynne Mellor, Georgetown University:

In the middle of the environmental, medical, and political histories, van Horssen challenges and adds nuance to the existing historical narrative of the 1949 strike in Asbestos … She places it back within its local historical milieu showing how the strike arose in response to a confluence of grievances about local politics, health issues, and community relations.

John Sandlos:

Painstakingly researched with a compelling writing style, A Town Called Asbestos fulfills the promise of recent U.S. environmental histories that integrated histories of labour, public health, and environmental change into a single narrative. It is essential reading for anyone interested in labour, industrial or environmental history, or any person who wants to know why a deadly substance may persist behind the walls where they live and work.

Elizabeth L. Jewett:
...a fascinating and, at times, disturbing history of a Canadian mining industry’s incredible rise and devastating collapse. This history elucidates the complex relationships humans have with the physical (natural and industrial) environments around them and how individuals and communities create, nurture, and defend their sense of place...It is a vital contribution to our knowledge of Canadian natural resource industries and the people who made their collection possible.

Ryan O'Connor, a writer, a historical consultant, and the author of the J.J. Talman Award-winning The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario (UBC Press):
For those interested in the history of Asbestos, Quebec, this is the book to read. Thoroughly researched in the archives -- its is, after all, based on a doctoral dissertation -- A Town Called Asbestos situates this particular town within a broader context of resource communities. It also raises some important questions, not only about the survival of communities reliant upon a single major employer but also regarding our federal government's willingness to use its positive international profile to market a hazardous product to developing nations. Read this book and feel the author's moral outrage.

Holly Doan:

A Town Called Asbestos is a crisp narrative that documents something close to manslaughter. If economic necessity saw mill employees literally work themselves to death, the recklessness of insurers and regulators remains inexplicable.

Gerald Markowitz is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and the author of several books including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution:
The scholarship is first rate. The story is compelling. This is a vitally important book given all the harm that asbestos still causes throughout the world.

From the Foreword by Graeme Wynn:
A Town Called Asbestos is, quite remarkably, the first book-length study to consider the environmental history and geography of this storied and troubled place ... van Horssen’s interest is clearly focused on Asbestos, but her account – which engages broad intellectual horizons and sharpens understanding of the human condition – ranges widely across disciplines, their literatures, and the face of the earth.