Book Reviews

Moving Mountains

by Penny Loeb
University Press of Kentucky, 2007

$27.95, 321 pages

For decades, coal companies have disregarded environmental protections and public health and safety in pursuit of coal buried deep in West Virginia's mountains. One particular form of mining, known as mountaintop removal, took environmental destruction to a new level.

Author Penny Loeb spent nine years reporting on the destruction to West Virginia communities, streams, forests and mountains at the hands of King Coal and mountaintop removal mining. Loeb, a former senior editor for U.S. News and World Report and investigative reporter for Newsday spent time deep in Appalachian communities. Moving Mountains focuses on Patricia Bragg, a local activist, Joe Lovett, a West Virginia attorney, and their friends and supporters who sued coal companies for spoiling drinking water wells and the Army Corps of Engineers for illegally permitting mountaintop removal sites. The legal and grassroots fight to curtail the destruction continues, and Moving Mountains gives insight into the organizing and lawsuits where the fight began. --Jared Saylor

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A portion of the sale will go to benefit Earthjustice