Reviews

"A highly original, imaginative book that offers an alternative history of modernity. Beautifully—at times, even poetically—written, Mineral Rites is animated by a clear sense of political urgency and a willingness to recast familiar stories in a new and original light. Creative and insightful."

— Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University, author of Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s

"An evocative and well-written cultural analysis of the fossil economy that combines rich examples with profound questions and tangled ambiguities. Johnson examines a number of different and fascinating cultural texts to uncover the energy transition from an organic muscular economy to fossil fuels."

— Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse University, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital

"Bob Johnson's Mineral Rites is a compelling and original take on fossil capitalism. With a historian's eye and writerly flair, he takes us on a fossil fueled journey through time and space. This book is an indispensable guide to our American addiction to fossil fuels—and possibly, how to extract ourselves from its deathly grip."

— Julie Sze, University of California–Davis, author of Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis

"In this fascinating, stunningly original book, Johnson astutely combines the personal with the political, the local with the global, the cultural with the material to chart the pleasures and pains of fossil capitalism. As the climate crisis continues to intensify, Mineral Rites offers an engrossing and provocative history of the present."

— Finis Dunaway, Trent University, author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images

"An exceptional book. Mineral Rites identifies vital energy modalities and traces their social life and mediation across the bodies, objects, affects, and cultural artifacts of fossil fueled modernity. With climate change in stark view, Johnson divines the historically uneven and destructive consequences of high carbon life, with its class, gendered, and racialized formations, in a stunning variety of practices, times, and spaces: the yoga studio, dinner table, ocean liner, highway; in historical attitudes to technology and in televisual and literary narratives. A thrilling and groundbreaking text in energy and environmental humanities."

— Graeme Macdonald, Associate Professor, University of Warwick, coeditor of Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Contexts and Critical Perspectives