Fearless Reviews Page 1: General Nonfiction

by Thomas Brooks
Alpha Multimedia Inc.
ISBN 0-9774629-3-5
250 pages/trade paperback
$17.95

After Thomas Brooks learned that he was adopted at age eleven, he began to wonder who his biological parents were. A Wealth of Family is the story of his search and the history of both his adoptive and biological parents. From inner city Pittsburgh to London to Nairobi, Brooks’ physical journey mirrors his emotional journey of going from being an only child to being surrounded by many half-siblings in both Europe and Africa.

Thomas’ adoptive mother Joan was a struggling divorcee when he first learned of his adoption. Living on the north side of Pittsburgh, he had always thought he resembled his cousins who were light skinned African Americans. But he discovered that his biological mother was white and his biological father came from Kenya. Suddenly comments made to him by other African Americans about his multiracial appearance began to make sense. In spite of the prejudice and ignorance of many of his classmates (both black and white) in high school, Thomas went on to become the class valedictorian and entered the University of Pittsburgh to study engineering.

But still the need to know where he came from was strong. Finally Thomas contacted the adoption agency and learned that his biological mother Dorothy had left a communication that it was all right for him to contact her if he ever was curious. He eventually met Dorothy, who by then resided in London, England with her children from a previous marriage. Thomas learned more about his father, who had been a Kenyan graduate student whom Dorothy had met as an undergraduate. After a brief affair, she learned she was carrying Thomas. Being unwed and pregnant in the mid-sixties with a biracial child, Dorothy did not have the support of her family. She felt she had no other option than to give Thomas up for adoption. Having grown up in a predominantly African American community, Thomas understood all too well how others' prejudice influenced Dorothy’s decision.

This is a moving story that demonstrates how with courage and determination an individual can bring together the separate strands of his heritage and weave them together into a loving whole.— C.APPEL

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Libby, Montana, poor and sparsely populated, lies about ten kilometers southwest of a vermiculite mine owned by W.R. Grace & Company. Vermiculite, a mineral discovered in the early twentieth century, has an impressive variety of usages, from insulation to fertilizer. Jobs at the mine come with a steady wage and a pension after twenty years; for the residents of Libby, Montana, it’s considered the best place to work. One small problem, though: this vermiculite is laced with tremolite asbestos, which is released as toxic dust when the vermiculite is mined. As the author explains, “Once inhaled, tremolite’s sharp needle-like fibers penetrate the respiratory tract, pierce the lung, and invade the tissue. . . . This gradual deposition of asbestos fibers develops into cancerous tumors whose effects only appear decades after initial exposure.”

This is particularly unfortunate for the miners and for all the residents of Libby, Montana, where the roads and people’s clothes and the insides of cars are liberally sprinkled with dust that blows down from the mine. But the Grace mine is also the source of approximately 80% of the world’s vermiculite supply, which currently insulates the attics of between 15 and 35 million American homes. And asbestos has been used in building construction throughout the U.S., including the World Trade Center, where millions of poisonous fibers were released into the New York City air on September 11, 2001. The full consequences of this event won’t be felt for another twenty to thirty years.