American Poison

Starred review from January 6, 2025
Science writer Stone (Sinkable) offers an enthralling biography of Alice Hamilton (1869–1970), who led a prescient but failed battle to ban leaded gasoline in the 1920s. A medical doctor interested in pathology, by her early 30s Hamilton had “singlehandedly” created the field of industrial medicine, the study of the impacts of chemicals and other environmental factors on industrial workers. As the first woman offered an appointment at Harvard, she began documenting cases of dementia, palsy, and early death in workers—and found they were all connected to lead exposure. This put her on a collision course with engineer Thomas Midgly Jr., inventor of leaded gasoline, a cheaper and more efficient fuel that was quickly adopted by the burgeoning automobile industry. Hamilton led the crusade against leaded gas, offering studies that proved “lead was harmful in almost any context... to every bodily organ.” The U.S. surgeon general called a 1925 summit to investigate the matter; Stone paints the proceedings as a masterpiece of manipulation by Midgly’s Ethyl Corporation, which lied and obfuscated its way to victory. (Leaded gasoline wasn’t fully banned until 1996.) Stone’s depiction of Hamilton is a captivating portrait of a privileged daughter of wealth whose eyes are slowly opened to capitalism’s exploitation of the poor (“I had begun to realize how narrow had been my education, how sheltered my life. I wanted to go into that underworld and see for myself,” she later wrote). Readers will be riveted.

January 15, 2025
A crusader takes on toxins. Science writer Stone investigates the life and work of physician Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) and inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889-1944), who became pitted against one another in the controversy over lead toxicity. As a young doctor, Hamilton lived at activist Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago, making house calls to poor families, during which she noted that men who worked near animal pens in stockyards suffered high rates of pneumonia, and those who worked in steel mills suffered from "a peculiar brain fogginess" caused by breathing carbon monoxide. These observations led to her extensive research into industrial poisons, making her an expert in the field. In 1910, invited to join a commission to investigate 29 known poisons, she focused on lead. The commission's findings about lead toxicity led to significant reform: Bosses in Illinois were required to compensate workers affected by poisonous fumes, gases, and dust. But toxins transcended the workplace after Midgley, intent on improving fuel combustion, invented an anti-knock tetraethyl leaded fuel. A significant breakthrough for the automotive industry, the leaded fuel "would mean their cars could run cleaner and go farther and, in the process, boost the allure of the automobile." Although automotive workers--and even Midgley himself--began suffering lead poisoning, he and the industry insisted on its safety, funding inadequate studies to bolster their claims. While Hamilton and other scientists disputed those findings, companies engaged in a strategy that still continues: "doubt, denial, and delay." Stone's informative history, populated with corporate shills, lazy investigators, and upstanding scientists, serves as a cautionary--and somewhat optimistic--tale. Hamilton, he notes, has been vindicated "on the dangers of low-dose poisoning from mercury, radium, asbestos, and carbon monoxide." And the public has grown rightly suspicious of governments' and corporations' "sweeping guarantees." Entertaining and eye-opening.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2025
Poison is tricky. The chief culprit in environmental writer Stone's latest investigation is lead, specifically tetraethyl leaded gasoline (ethyl) which was made available to the public in 1923 to eliminate engine knock. But leaded gasoline was lethal in the factory and at large as a pollutant. Stone chronicles other types of poison that were rampant at the time and what propelled their spread: corporate greed, poverty, lying, and discrimination. The hero of the story is Alice Hamilton, a physician, scientist, and early advocate of occupational health and safety who became the first female faculty member at Harvard. Hamilton took on the burgeoning car industry, facing down leaders and inventors associated with General Motors, Standard Oil, and DuPont who knew the danger of leaded gasoline--it can produce serious symptoms when inhaled or absorbed through the skin--but continued to distort the truth and peddle it for large profits. After 1995, it was finally banned for use in U.S. automobiles. Stone's lucidly written account illuminates a champion of early public-health and environmental activism and the ongoing struggle to hold big business accountable for grievous misconduct.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.