Asbestos House (small format)
Gideon Haigh
• Winner of the 2007 Blake Dawson Waldron Prize for Business Literature.
• Winner of the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for a literary or media work advancing public debate
• Winner of the 2006 Westfield/Waverley Library Award for Literature
• Winner of the Gleebooks Prize, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2007
• Shortlisted for the 2006 Walkley Non-Fiction Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award for 2006
Founded in 1888, James Hardie Industries is one of Australia’s oldest, richest and proudest corporations. And its fortunes were based on what proved to be one of the worst industrial poisons of the twentieth century: asbestos.
Asbestos House, the name of the grand headquarters that Hardie built itself in 1929, tells two remarkable tales. It 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. It is also the story that the company, knowingly and unknowingly, forgot: how, even as fibro built a nation, the asbestos fibre from which it was made condemned thousands to death.
Reconstructed from hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documentation, Asbestos House is a multi-award-winning saga of high finance, industrial history, legal intrigue, medical breakthrough and human frailty.
Gideon Haigh
Author photo
Gideon Haigh has been writing about sport and business for over twenty years. He began his career as a journalist, writing on business news for The Age newspaper from 1984 to 1992 and for The Australian from 1993 to 1995. He has since contributed to over twenty newspapers and magazines, both on business topics as well as on sport, mostly cricket. Haigh has written or edited over twenty books.
Extent: 448pp
Size: 210mm x 135mm
ISBN (13): 9781921215704
RRP: $29.95
Pub date: October 2007
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