“On Monday, April 23, 2012, the Lakeland sawmill exploded and then burned […]. The explosion and subsequent fire killed Alan Little, 43, and Glenn Roche, 46, and injured more than twenty other workers”. Many books in the field of occupational health and safety (OHS) begin with the story of a dramatic event in order to impress on the reader the importance of the topics that are going to be presented. This one is no exception. A very interesting feature of this book is that it has clearly been conceived by teachers who intended it for teaching purposes. Each chapter has the same structure. It starts with between 4 and 6 learning objectives. Then, a vignette (as they call it) presents a brief case story to introduce and illustrate the topic of the chapter. Through the text, a series of 2 to 7 inserts in the form of shaded boxes present additional material or examples to support the main text. Each chapter concludes with discussion questions and exercises, as well as notes and bibliographical references of course. The introduction in Chapter 1 presents some basic concepts and definitions; there is a long list of “Key Terms” definitions at the end of the book. The legislative framework is the subject of Chapter 2. Then Chapter 3 discusses the heart of the prevention process, namely hazard recognition, assessment and control. Chapters 4 to 6 cover the broad categories of risk factors related to hazards (4 - physical, including ergonomic; 5 - biological and chemical; 6 - psycho-social). Various health effects of employment are presented in Chapter 7. Chapters 8 and 9 cover two important facets of prevention, i.e. training and injury prevention programs, and incident investigation. Disability management and return to work is the subject of Chapter 10. Finally, indications on “How to get things done” are presented in Chapter 11 on the practice of health and safety. The authors have adopted a sociological, political and labour relations approach to their presentation of the various themes. Such an approach is justified in view of the numerous debates concerning various OHS issues and of the various flaws in OHS systems. Indeed, the person interested in the field of OHS, and even more so the practitioner in that field, ought to know about the assumptions, the ideological biases and the shortcomings underlying what is generally considered as basic knowledge. They are absolutely right, for instance, when they say that “setting exposure limits is not purely a scientific process, but also a political one” (p. 102). Too bad for those who had great faith in precise values of TLVs or other forms of exposure limits On the one hand, some of the issues would require more in-depth exploration. For example, the book is based on “the acknowledgement that workers and employers have conflicting interests” (back cover). Every student of labour relations is aware of that. However, in Great Britain in 1974 Lord Robens, in the Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Safety and Health at Work which he chaired, suggests that whilst both parties may have conflicting interests on a majority of topics, both parties have an interest in a healthy workforce. It is on that premise that the UK legislation, like that of a majority of jurisdictions in the industrialized world, proposed concertation mechanisms such as the joint health and safety committees (JHSCs). When they are implemented and supported properly, JHSCs have produced noticeable and lasting OHS results. So the question needs to be asked: are generally conflicting interests between the parties such an insurmountable impediment to proper OHS functioning or to efficient incident …