Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region (PA) (Images of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)Dear to my heart---raised in an anthracite coal mining town. This book is the closest to reality I have read. Good pictures, good explanations. Would be a great gift for anyone interested in this heritage

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Four distinct anthracite coal fields encompass an area of 1,700 square miles in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underground coal mining was at its zenith and the work of miners was more grueling and dangerous than it is today. Faces blackened by coal and helmet lamps lit by fire are no longer parts of the everyday lives of miners in the region. Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region is a journey into a world that was once very familiar. These vintage photographs of collieries, breakers, miners, drivers, and breaker boys illuminate the dark of the anthracite mines. The pictures of miners, roof falls, mules, and equipment deep underground tell the story of the hard lives lived around the hard coal. Above ground, breaker boys toiled in unbearable conditions inside the noisy, vibrating, soot-filled monsters known as coal breakers.

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Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World Review

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Alex did such extensive research in writing this book it is awesome. The story is about the birth and death of one of the most thriving coal mining regions in the country. The McDowell County seat of Welch, West Virginia was at one time referred to as "The Biggest Little City" in the USA. Now it is a lonely place filled with ghosts of the past but it is definitely still there, all but forgotten by the very government that at one time owned all the land that they stole from the early settlers. The republican party, together with all the coal mine owners treated the poor miners very badly. It was a good life for the rich politicians and the wealthy coal operators but for thousands of coal miners and their families they were treated like prisoners. The immigrants from eastern Europe and the poor blacks from the south were tricked into going to Gary Hollow to make a "good?" life. It was always a huge struggle for the uneducated to barely scrape by. If you are interested in early American suffering at the hands of the US government then you will find this book of American History very interesting indeed. I have been studying this book for some months and it amazes me how much suffering was endured by these honest hard working men.

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Growing Up in Coal Country Review

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(More customer reviews)A very interesting little book for anyone who grew up in or has an interest in the history of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region. The stories in this book apply to so many thousands of families that lived there and tried so hard to make a living under the harshest of conditions. Life was anything but easy for the anthracite miner and his family - no medical insurance (but then medical care was almost non-existent), no paid holidays, just dirty and dangerous work. The book is brief, reads easy but generally does a good job of telling it like it was back then and in that place.

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And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails Review

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(More customer reviews)I am not so much a sucker for history books as I am a sucker for very focused, almsot gimmicky, history books. Andrew Carr's _Drink: A Social History of America_ is a similarly gimmicky history book that I (pun coming) ate and drank up furiously, and Wayne Curtis has provided an equally capturing read with _And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails_.
This book comes from the level perspective of a connoseur of rum, one who enjoys the depth of the drink, which includes the history of it and the stories behind it. Besides the unsolveable questions of who ever first invented something like the mai tai or who even first made the first batch of the molasses-based spirit, Wayne Curtis delves through a liquor that has been both a savior and a demon for America.
And that is the main point of this book that I truly treasure--for nowadays, rum is considered a very tropical drink, something more at home in a pina colada or a tiki bar than something attached to the dirty farmland of the New World, but Curtis reattaches rum to its colonial identity and heritage, along with solid associations with pirates and seafarers. Rather than being a light, sit-back-on-the-beach drink, Curtis attaches rum back to flogging and piracy and the Revolutionary War. And he does this in each chapter through identifying a particular way of serving rum (the mojito, the flip, or just plain grog) to examine how that drink played its role in history. Though rum is a liquor that can take many, many forms, Curtis looks at how all spirits were lumped into the term 'rum' for Prohibition, and also how rum came into grace, then fell out of it, and almost seemed to fall off the face of the Earth altogether, only to soar back, though in a new way that Curtis bashes thoroughly in the final chapter, which examines the industrialization of rum.
This is a very fascinating and readable book that is filled with humor and appropiate snobbery for a liquor that may not have the high rep of things like cognac and scotch, but certainly has the street cred to kick any other liquor's rear.


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