LAST MAN OUT

A strikingly told story of a Canadian mining catastrophe.

In 1958, in the prettily named Springhill, Nova Scotia, a rush of subterranean energy compressed the deep chambers of the town's coal mine, thrusting the floors of the tunnels against their roofs. Two-and-a-half miles underground, dozens of men were trapped in small pockets of space soon to be in utter darkness, the maze of tunnels crushed about them, gas seeping here and there. Through interviews with survivors, the autobiography of the local doctor, and, most fascinatingly, a study of survival strategies conducted after the disaster, the award-winning Greene (Praying for Sheetrock, 1991, etc.) recreates the extraordinary efforts undertaken by those trapped and those on top to keep themselves from flying apart under the circumstances. She tracks in excruciating detail the actions of two groups of men—seven in one, twelve in another—as they tended the injured, scrounged for food, devised ways to make contact, considered whether or not to cut off one man's arm that had been pinned inside a wall of fallen coal, forcing him into a standing slouch. The last of those men were finally freed nine days later, though 76 others died. In the still-segregated state of Georgia, authorities were unpleasantly surprised to find a black miner in a group they opportunistically invited down for a celebratory vacation; he was also shunned by some for breaking the miners’ code when he allowed himself to be singled out as Canadian Man of the Year. Greene concludes with a portrait of the ghastly emotional consequences of the ordeal that did not disappear in the light of day. Some of her miner profiles are better than others, and a few are obviously patched together from too-scant material, but she captures the gloom in all its manifestations.

Its release so soon after the widely publicized Pennsylvania mining disaster and rescue should boost the book commercially, but this sensitive account stands on its own artistic merits. (8 b&w photos, not seen)