Product Description: This book reveals the hidden health dangers in many of the seemingly innocent products we encounter every day--a tube of glue in a kitchen drawer, a bottle of bleach in the laundry room, a rayon scarf on a closet shelf, a brass knob on the front door, a wood plank on an outdoor deck. A compelling exposé, written by a physician with extensive experience in public health and illustrated with disturbing case histories, How Everyday Products Make People Sick is a rich and meticulously documented account of injury and illness across different time periods, places, and technologies. It presents a picture not of one exceptional or corrupt industry but rather of how run-of-the-mill manufacturing processes and consumer marketing expose workers and the general public alike to toxic hazards. More troubling still, even when such hazards are recognized, calls for their control are routinely ignored. Written for a wide audience, it offers a critical and disquieting perspective on the relationship between industrial development and its adverse health consequences. Among the surprisingly common hazards discussed in How Everyday Products Make People Sick: * Glue and rubber cement * Chlorine bleach * Rayon and other synthetic textiles * Welding and other metal fumes * Wood preservatives * Gasoline additives
A Compelling Book That Presents The Broad Context of Toxic Problems This is an outstandingly readable book despite its sometimes dark and gruesome accounts of things gone badly awry. Dr. Blanc is capable of causing delight even with material that might not be very promising in someone else's hands. He seems to have taken into account Samuel Johnson's adage that "what is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention."
This might have been an angry and difficult book to read with the horrors it recounts, but the approach reminded me of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" since the focus is widened from medicine and includes medical and chemical history, biography, along with references to arts and literature. Dr. Blanc's knowledge is clearly wide-ranging.
Dr. Blanc frames economic and political problems in a long historical view that makes it obvious that the problems are not new and our society is not much more wise than it has been in the past. The same problems keep happening over and over (literally, the same problems with some of the same substances that have been known to be poisonous since antiquity). Adding to that, new, untested items, some very likely to cause harm, come on the market with little consideration. We should be asking ourselves how it feels to be human guinea pigs.
Any thoughtful reader of the book will be lead to the question: When do we demand something better from the incompetent leaders who say, "Trust us, we know what's best for you" while they give in to economic pressures? When do we tell the people more interested in the bottom line than the value of human life to shove it?
Dr. Blanc presents a detailed and complex story that is well researched and fascinating. He appreciates the details, the personalities, and the discoveries even when telling a story that is a train wreck in slow motion.
Despite the implications from the jacket blurb, this is NOT a book that catalogs all the dangers around the average person. Dr. Blanc mostly limits the number of specific toxins he presents and gives fairly in-depth and interesting discussion of them.
Kudos on a book that is well written, fun to read (!), and insightful.
Wonderfully Researched and Written I admit that I bought this book for its title while in the midst of a book buying frenzy, thinking that it would be a run-of-the-mill, toxins in the home primer of sorts. I spent the first 20 or 30 pages thinking, "This book is not at all what I thought it would be. Why does it have this misleading title? Why did it have that misleading product description?" Even the reviewer's quote on the book cover is misleading: "A superb tool for making our homes, finally, a safe place to raise children." As another Amazon reviewer pointed out, this is just colossally crappy marketing.
When I got past the slight disappointment of owning a very different book than I thought I had purchased, I realized, as other reviewers have, that this book is an incredibly well-researched and well-written history of modern chemical development and its consequences. I couldn't put it down. I would recommend this book to anyone who is not only interested in how chemicals in our environment can make us sick, but also in how some of those chemicals came about and how they ended up in our households despite the fact that they are well-known toxins. Read this book along with Not Just A Pretty Face, In Defense of Food, Exposed, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, The Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, etc., to usher in full-blown outrage at the fact that our government doesn't do more to regulate the poisons that corporations are happy to pump into us on a daily basis.
How everyday products came to be Excellent history of how products are made and their affect on the workers that made them. Provides insight into what motivates the production of a product and illustrates how we arrived at a world surrounded by an unhealthy enviroment. Definitely worth reading.
Important Part of Emerging Literature on "True Cost" I bought and read this book together with Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power and I recommend both of them. This one is written from an occupational health perspective, and provides superb history on "the industrial disease" while "Exposed" is more from a public policy perspective.
The author mentions, and I plan to sign up for if I can, the Center for Disease Control (CDC)"Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report."
The author who started out focusing on workplace toxicity, also covers household toxicity, most alarming of which was paint emitting toxic vapors.
The author laments the manner in which the government, think tanks, and corporations are all doing a slow roll on toxicity, ignoring it, covering it up, or delaying action on it. The The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings is nowhere to be found, in part because of The Republican War on Science.
The author is authoritative and not at all over-bearing in laying out the case against an ignorances of toxicity that is assuredly not in the public interest. He addresses neurological impacts as the most subtle and most frightening and most cummulative in nature.
His bottom line is that the pharmaceutical, industrial materials, and household goods industries are not doing enough testing and not getting enogh oversight. From this book one can easily see the varied government agencies nominally responsible for public health being phased out as was the Office of Technology Assessment.
The author notes that emerging toxins are of real concern, but that dollars and attention are being consumed by SARS, West Nile, and other biological threats (diseases are coming together and mutating in animal hosts, then jumping to human hosts, and becoming drug resistant more quickly).
Microwave popcorn lung caught my attention. As convenient as it is to use, the microwave evidently enhances toxicity of some substances, and we literally have no menu to follow in avoiding this.
My one disappointment is the lack of a table of toxic products, a lack of dollar figures, mortality and disability figures. I believe that a second edition of this book could be much improved, and as one reviewer notes, the rich history in the book given a higher profile.
The notes and index are superb and the book overall is of sufficient value to the public to warrant five stars. This is an important work.
See also: Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
The federal government, at the political level in both Congress and the Executive, cannot be trusted to act in the public interest. Wall Street is beginning to realize that that the "true cost" of corrupting the government has been the hollowing out of America's population, and in my view, it will be the fund managers at Wall Street who must recognize the value of public health, just as the rich in NYC realized in the 1920's that disease is indiscriminate.
Excellent book.
Misleading title for a scientific journey into history If you are looking for how everyday products make people sick (toxins at home and in the workplace) try a book like What's Toxic, What's Not by Ginsberg & Toal, which does a fine job of covering this topic in a style that makes it easy to find just the toxins or areas of exposure that concern you.
If you are interested in the fascinating history of toxins in the workplace, this is your book. In engaging and clever narrative, Blanc tells the stories of toxins that sicken people, the often slow process of uncovering the source of illness, the eventual phasing out of the product (often because another product rendered it obsolete, not due to health concern), and the frequent return of the underlying toxin in a new product.
Blanc brings history alive with stories of individuals exposed to invisible threats. His narrative is supported by scientific analysis, providing a reassuring direction and momentum to a disturbing, sometimes frustrating, topic.
I am the Director of Education for the Foresight Nanotech Institute and the author of Technology Challenged: Understanding Our Creations & Choosing Our Future.
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