Book Review: “Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia”

Journalist Chris Hamby’s book is a searing and heartfelt look at the struggles for justice in the West Virginia coalfields.

I’m a son of West Virginia, and I’m the son of a coal miner. So, when I saw the book Soul Full of Coal Dust available as an ARC from NetGalley, I pounced on it. From the first page to the last, I found myself swept up in the story that Christ Hamby, a journalist at The New York Times, was telling. This is a story of the extraordinary men and women of my home state who have had to wage a decades-long war to get the benefits they deserve from an industry hell-bent on exploiting every resource in West Virginia, including its people. In particular, they have struggled to gain compensation for black lung, a terrible lung disorder that is as much a part of coal mining as the hardhat.

Hamby has an instinctive grasp of how to get to the real meat of the story, while also giving the reader the kind of context necessary to understand why this issue is so pressing. We learn, for example, of the truly terrible physical toll that coal mining takes on the bodies of those who work both underground and aboveground, of how the dust from coal causes horrific damage to the lungs of almost anyone…