Fatal Deception : The Terrifying True Story of How Asbestos is Killing America

Most Americans mistakenly believe asbestos was banned long ago. In fact, it is still legal and can still kill you. Its microscopic fibers cause painful and incurable diseases.

Despite being outlawed in nearly every other industrialized country, asbestos remains a legal component of more than three thousand common products in the United States. These include toasters, washers/dryers, ovens, building supplies, and automobile brakes. Our confusion about asbestos is no accident.

Fatal Deception is a chilling expose of the asbestos industry's successful seventy-year campaign to hide the deadly effects of its products from the American people. The stakes are high -- tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Michael Bowker rips the cover off the decades of deceit, including the treachery in Libby, Montana, site of the most deadly environmental disaster in U.S. history. He also unveils a startling and ongoing cover-up at Ground Zero -- where thousands of New Yorkers may still be suffering from exposure to dangerous levels of asbestos fibers.

Compelling, enraging, and very timely, Fatal Deception is not just a fascinating story, it is a plea to the government and to the American people to help sponsor research into asbestos-related diseases -- and a call to arms to ban asbestos now.

The straightforward language, excellent pacing, and suspense-building structure of "Fatal Deception" make it a hard book to put down. Author Michael Bowker skillfully weaves heartwrenching victims' stories with damning excerpts from documents proving that for over sixty years the asbestos industry and the U.S. government concealed scientific evidence that would have prevented thousands of agonizing deaths. At least as far back as the 1930s, industry higher-ups knew that exposure to asbestos was extremely dangerous. Yet not only did they fail to warn their workers, they brazenly lied and assured them all that dust they were breathing and taking home on their clothes was harmless. Faced with growing medical evidence to the contrary, the asbestos companies conspired in a long-lasting cover-up that successfully hid the truth from the public so that asbestos workers and their families wouldn't discover the dangers to which they were exposing themselves. The industry had help in this cover-up, of course, from good old Uncle Sam.

"Fatal Deception" is not merely a sickening portrait of coldblooded corporate greed, but a wake-up call that vividly illustrates why the U.S. government will never behave with integrity until Americans stop electing politicians willing to prostitute themselves to whichever special-interest groups stick the most money down their pants. Angry? You bet I am. By the time you finish this book, you will be, too.