Asbestos House: The Secret History of James Hardie Industries

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, …