Synopsis "shift report (in English)"
A rambling and unconventional history of coal mining in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1760-2012Coal miners have a way of becoming heroes to kids. They are, for the most part, people who know what they can do. They drive big machines and go deep underground in the dark. They have hard-toed boots and hard hats and those fascinating cap lamps. They are Authorized Personnel Only, so powerful they can walk past doors with those signs on them. They can work in a group or survive alone. They look at stuff fit to turn some people to quivering Jello, and they don't turn a hair. It's the job, they all volunteered, and most of them are just crazy enough to be fun, provided you have a sense of humor about loud noises and a lack of panic about your own mortality. It's hard to nail down the nature of mining and miners, except that everything seems more intense. I've never seen a car window sticker of a smiling figure in a cubicle labeled "Accountant!" or "Proud Mid-Level Manager!" On the other hand, there are plenty of trucks around with a skull and crossed pick and shovel on the back, or a silhouette of a miner crawling along with his headlamp labeled "I've Got Friends In Low Places," "Six Inches From Hell" or...this is a G-rated summary and some of the funniest stickers aren't. Some of the humor is grim, some of it is bawdy and all of it quietly admits that the job is dangerous. This is not a book to argue about global warming or the politics of energy. It's about the people who mine coal and the families who live with it. It's about coal towns and halushki, good and bad bosses, good and bad miners, fights we all wish hadn't happened and tombstones that should have had much later dates on them. It's life around the coalfields, good, bad, ugly and sometimes completely absurd.
