Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Wasteland
By Jason Epstein
Night Comes to the Cumberlands……
by Harry Caudill
Atlantic Little Brown, 394 pp., $6.75
The pathetic history of the Cumberland Plateau in Eastern Kentucky illustrates the results, for men and nature, of unregulated free enterprise, the pre-eminence of the rights of property, and the absence of responsible public supervision. Though the author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands did not intend his book to be such a tract—or a tract at all—the lesson is nonetheless clear. Its consequences are visible in the ruined mountains, the blasted forests, and the miserable population of the Kentucky hills. Nor is the lesson new. For years these hills have been scrutinized by social scientists, their folk art has been collected and catalogued, their unfortunate people have been organized and reorganized by the mining companies, by the U.M.W., and by various government agencies. Communists, novelists, photographers, cartoonists, and song-pluggers have, for decades, been bringing word of these mountains to the rest of the country. But to no avail. Today the area is devastated, and Harry Caudill, whose book describes this disaster, concludes with the sorrowful suggestion that by tomorrow the hills may not be there at all. Erosion and the brutal process of strip mining, by which the mountainsides and tops are bulldozed away so that the coal can be scooped up with great power shovels, threaten to eradicate the whole region.
Review, 2386 words
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