![]() ![]() In the end, they still suffer, and he, like others before him, has his prize. He spent eight years researching and interviewing people, mostly in Raleigh County, West Virginia, who patiently explained to him, as coalfield residents have done for more than a century, how they suffer, and the source of their exploitation. Hamby earned a Pulitzer for this book with some excellent storytelling. Hamby’s research is deep, but we don’t see the suffering as much as we see the paperwork. Massey Coal Company, which is the subject of Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia by New York Times reporter Chris Hamby. There was no money for a dust collector in his workshop for a long time. His 18th-century skills brought high prices for custom pieces, but nothing for the time-consuming process. We sometimes said-behind his back-that he brought it on himself, but that wasn’t entirely true. When he died, we suddenly noticed the quiet-the absence of wheezing and crashing of the machine that labored as hard as he did to get air in and out of his lungs. ![]() My brother always knew how to adjust the level of his oxygen machine so that he could make it through one of his horrible coughing spasms. Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia by Chris Hamby (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |