An Air That Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal.

Andrew Schneider and David McCumber G.P. Putnam's Sons www.penguin.com 448 pp., $25.95

This is fundamentally a story about the so-called American dream.

It is the story of Edgar Alley, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who headed west to seek his fortune and discovered a massive deposit of vermiculite--an ore containing large quantities of asbestos--in a mountain in Libby, Montana. It is the story of Perley Vatland, son of Norwegian immigrants, and Les Skramstad, a cowboy from North Dakota, who came to Libby to work at the mine, provide for their families, and contribute to the community.

And it is the story of William Russell Grace, who fled the Irish potato famine in 1851, arrived in Peru with nothing, and worked his way up to coming one of the biggest shipping and packaging companies in the world.

An Air That Kills is also the story of how two of these four pioneers became rich, while the other two became deathly ill. Ailey's vermiculite, later extensively mined and sold by W.R. Grace & Co., turned out to contain such high quantities of asbestos that its dust killed or sickened nearly the entire population of Libby. Skramstad and Vatland brought the dust home on their clothes at the end of each workday, exposing their families to asbestos. Dust from the mine settled on the children's playing fields in Libby, and vermiculite sprang from the soil in the town's vegetable gardens.

Vermiculite and pure asbestos from the mine were shipped across the court try and the world, in the form of packing material, insulation, fertilizer, and countless other products. Asbestos from the mine was sprayed on the World Trade Center buildings as they were erected in the 1970s, and it filled the air when they came down in 2001.

The scary part of the story--as the authors, Andrew Schneider and David McCumber, continually remind us--is that the companies in charge of mining that vermiculite were fully aware of the dangers asbestos posed, yet they continued to expose workers, their families, and the company's customers to the deadly fibers. As one old miner, pausing after taking a breath from his oxygen tank, put it: "All of them ... just said there was nothing in that dust that could hurt you. There's a lot of people dead today who would still be alive if we were told the truth about that ore."

Perhaps scarier, though, is the documentation that the authors have collected to show that EPA regulators also knew about the asbestos at Libby--and did nothing about it for nearly 20 years. The authors lay out in excruciating detail the information available to the agency and describe the political pressures that ensured the information about health risks was never made public or used against W.R. Grace & Co. or any other asbestos companies.

This high level of detail in no way detracts from the book's readability, however. The authors are longtime investigative journalists who broke the Libby story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999. An Air That Kills reads like a newspaper account--journalistic, punchy, and full of anecdotes to draw the reader in, backed up by meticulously researched data. It is a page-turned, each chapter a hot-off-the-press expose.

And Schneider and McCumber know how to hold a reader's attention. Just when the Libby story begins to wane, they turn to the discovery of asbestos in crayons and automobile parts, and report that, contrary to popular belief, asbestos has never actually been banned in the United States.

If you think this book sounds like a rehash of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, think again. In this case, the heroes are the locals, not the lawyers: they include Libby activists Gayla Vatland (Perley's daughter) and Les Skramstad, local doctors who relentlessly documented the town's asbestosis cases, and local regulators and politicians who would not let the matter lie--even in the face of enormous political pressure from the asbestos lobby and the current Bush administration.

Asbestos-related litigation provided a great deal of material for this book. In their endnotes, the authors say that they used more than 120 trial transcripts and depositions to "support and explain the facts." Any trial lawyer knows the sweat and tears that were shed to get those transcripts and depositions into the public record; one weakness of the book is the authors' failure to acknowledge countless lawyers' efforts in bringing that information to light.

Still, Schneider and McCumber have done a great service by telling the story of Libby's asbestos crisis in a style and tone that will appeal to a far larger audience than that of the typical class-action chronicle. The book's greatest lesson may be that it takes a coordinated effort among activists, journalists, friendly regulators and politicians, and hard-fighting lawyers to get important stories like Libby's into the public mind.

My final thought when I closed this book was that what happened in Libby is only one of many similar stories that reveal the dark side of the American dream. Most of these remain tragically untold. This one, however, is told extremely well, and I encourage anyone committed to fighting injustice to pick up a copy.

KATE GORDON iS the Baron-Brayton Fellow at Trial Lawyers for Public Justice in Oakland, California.