This is the story of a crushingly ordinary man who had the misfortune to live in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The son of a baptized Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Willy Wiemokli (1908–1983) was declared a half-Jew by the laws of the Third Reich, and because of this, he and his father were briefly interned in Buchenwald. Although his father was eventually executed in Auschwitz in 1943, Willy went on to become an accountant for J. A. Topf & Söhne, the manufacturer of the ovens used in the death of his father as well as thousands of others in concentration camps. Persecuted by the Nazis, he also participated, minimally, in the Nazi-led genocide. This paradox and Willy’s liminal status gives his fascinating biography historical significance, adding a new dimension to our understanding of what the Nazi race policies meant to ordinary Germans. In this brief telling of an otherwise average man’s life, Schüle and Sowade reveal the pervasive and long-term effect of the race laws. Based solely on archival records, Willy’s story gives insight into the muddled and impossible choices of vulnerable individuals living under the Third Reich and the blurred boundaries between victim, bystander, and accomplice.

Published in Germany in 1920, Sammy Gronemann’s satirical novel set in 1903 at the time of the Sixth Zionist Congress follows the life of a baptized Jew, Heinz Lehnsen, as he negotiates legal entanglements, German culture, religious differences, and Zionist aspirations. A chance encounter with a long-lost cousin from a shtetl in Russia further complicates the plot and challenges the characters’ notions of Jewish identity and their belief in the claims of the Zionist movement. Gronemann's humor and compassion slyly expose the foibles and contradictions of human behavior. With deep insight into German society, German-Jewish culture, and antisemitism, Utter Chaos paints a highly entertaining portrait of German Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For decades asbestos was considered an ideal substance and therefore was called 'the mineral of the twentieth century'. Even though the fiber had already proven much earlier to cause various ailments, a real boom began in the 1950s and prospered everywhere in Europe. This book retraces the history of the Swiss asbestos cement company Eternit, investigating the strategy it developed – together with other asbestos industrialists – to prevent this carcinogen from being outlawed until, in 1999, an EU Directive was finally adopted to this end. The book also reviews the struggle of the asbestos workers and their families to gain official recognition of, and compensation for, the harm suffered.

Much of the scientific work on environmental health research has come from the clinical and biophysical sciences. Yet contributions are being made from the social sciences with respect to economic change, distributional equities, political will, public perceptions and the social geographical challenges of the human health-environments linkages. Offering the first comprehensive and cohesive summary of the input from social science to this field, this book focuses on how humans theorize their relationships to the environment with respect to health and how these ideas are mediated through an evaluation of risk and hazards. Most work on risk has focused primarily on environmental problems. This book extends and synthesizes these works for the field of human health, treating social, economic, cultural and political context as vital. Bringing disparate literatures from across several disciplines together with their own applied research and experience, John Eyles and Jamie Baxter deal with scientific uncertainty in the everyday issues raised and question how social theories and models of the way the world works can contribute to understanding these uncertainties. This book is essential reading for those studying and researching in the fields of health geography and environmental studies as well as environmental sociology, social and applied anthropology, environmental psychology and environmental politics.

Japan’s asbestos disasters, encompassing both occupational disease and environmental pollution, have been caused principally by the asbestos textile, asbestos cement water pipe, and construction industries. This book is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to those disasters as it incorporates medical science, economics, political science, law, architecture, environmental engineering, sociology, and journalism. Written by authorities in their fields, the chapters reflect the integration of these disciplines in topics that include a historical review of asbestos issues in Japan, asbestos-related diseases, international aspects of the asbestos industry, public policy, divisions of responsibility, relief activities in emergencies, and countermeasures enacted by local governments. The lessons of asbestos problems and policies in Japan are particularly important for developing countries to prevent the proliferation of asbestos disasters. This volume serves as a textbook on asbestos issues for all countries, especially where there is widespread use of asbestos.

Reconstructed from hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documentation, this reference focuses on one of Austalia's oldest and proudest corporations, Hardie, retelling the story of one of the worst industrial poisons of the 20th century, asbestos. This compelling narrative relates the frantic financial engineering in 2001, during which Hardie cut adrift its liabilities to sufferers of asbestos-related disease, the public and political odium that followed, and the extraordinary deal that resulted.

For decades, manufacturers from around the world relied on asbestos to produce a multitude of fire-retardant products. As use of the mineral became more widespread, medical professionals discovered it had harmful effects on human health. Mining and manufacturing companies downplayed the risks to workers and the general public, but eventually, as the devastating nature of asbestos-related deaths became common knowledge, the industry suffered terminal decline. A Town Called Asbestos looks at how the people of Asbestos, Quebec, worked and lived alongside the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world. Dependent on this deadly industry for their community’s survival, they developed a unique, place-based understanding of their local environment; the risks they faced living next to the giant opencast mine; and their place within the global resource trade. This book unearths the local-global tensions that defined Asbestos’s proud history and reveals the challenges similar resource communities have faced – and continue to face today.