“Provides readers an often-dramatic episodic overview of coal in American history, the great paradox between power and destruction that we could escape today.”

"Today coal combustion plays a major in deepening the global climate crisis, endangering still more lives.”

“An absorbing read. . . . Black Gold is a vital book for anyone seeking to understand American history over the past two centuries and how coal lay at the black heart of its most important industrial, social, and economic developments. Most of all, by helping the reader understand America’s coal-fired past, it offers a timely lesson for the future.”

"The story that Black Gold chronicles could not be timelier nor told better."

“Journalist Bob Wyss describes how coal sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families. . . . Now two centuries of carbon combustion endanger American lives and safety, a threat that remains unresolved. This is coal’s most enduring legacy; Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got here.”

 “Spanning such a wide range of interwoven subjects, this is a book that can be expected to be worthy of the attention of an equally wide ranging community of readers.”

“Black Gold contributes nicely to the assemblage of approaches to environmental history, as well as the corpus of texts tackling the environmental, economic, and social histories of coal. . . . Wyss fulfills his stated goal of illuminating how coal shaped and interconnected lives, events, technologies, and commodities in the United States.”

“Black Gold offers an engaging narrative of coal’s place in US industrialization and its human and environmental costs. The prose is lively and accessible, and the episodic, character-driven structure invites students to take a glimpse of subjects they might otherwise find forbidding.”