Volume 17, Number 9 · December 2, 1971
Betrayal in the Mines
By Harry M. Caudill
Death and the Mines
by Brit Hume
Grossman, 288 pp., $7.50
An ancient English ballad relates that 'Toil is the lot of a coal miner's life, and tears are the lot of a coal miner's wife.' The naïve might suppose that in the old age of the twentieth century and after the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Crusade, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, modern technology and a heightened reverence for life would have softened the toil and wiped away some of the tears, but it is not so. Brit Hume's matter-of-fact book jars the reader with the inescapable conclusion that in the United States today the miner's lot is astoundingly similar to that of his forebears who brought coal to the top of pits for George III.
Review, 2625 words
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