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Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet. By Timothy J. LeCain. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xiv, 273 pp. $26.95, isbn 978-0-8135-4529-5.)
The title sounds sensationalistic, but Mass Destruction is a solid contribution to environmental history as well as to the history of metal mining in America. There has been a tendency among academics to view these two fields as mutually exclusive; at the annual conference of the Western History Association, for example, the breakfast meeting of the mining historians has typically been scheduled opposite that of the environmental historians, making it impossible for a member of one group to attend the breakfast of the other. But Timothy J. LeCain has nicely bridged any perceived gap between the two...