Valley So Low by Jared Sullivan

This book made me cough. Yes, that is a strange way to start a book review, but hear me out.

Jared Sullivan tells the story of America’s worst coal disaster in his exceptional Valley So Low. In 2008, a gigantic mountain of ash waste did what mountains of waste do and fell over. No one was killed but a huge swath of a Tennessee valley was covered in the mess. Normally, you might expect the disaster would take up a huge amount of page count. However, Sullivan makes it clear right away that the disaster was not the coal ash flood, it was the cleanup.

What follows is a deliberate, slow motion horror story. Workers are pulled in to clean up. They are denied safety equipment. Guess what happens to your respiratory system when you breathe in hazardous materials for years? Exactly what you expect, but not according to their employer.

Sullivan does an incredible job of telling a fully fleshed out story. You get to know the workers who have their death warrants figuratively signed. You get to know the lawyers who truly are Davids fighting Goliath. To go back to my opening, the narrative is so affecting that I found myself coughing out of nowhere like some sort of sympathetic response to what I was reading about these men and their families. Nothing I can write would be a stronger recommendation than that.

Interested?

Buy it here!

Recommendation if you like this one:

Yasmine Ali, Walk Through Fire