Puts the human faces of dozens of miners their kinfolk on a grave mining disaster. (5 b&w photos, not seen)
Paperback true-crime author Olsen thoroughly combs the Sunshine Mine fire of 1972, a disaster that claimed 91 lives, for both the terrible facts and the human interest.
In a hardrock silver mine such as Sunshine, he writes, fire was an unlikely hazard. So when wisps of smoke began to work their way through the shafts, it didn’t alarm the miners, who thought it was probably a small flare-up that would soon dissipate. That would not be the case, Olsen reveals in this near blow-by-blow account. The smoke soon became thick as sludge and was followed by a sharp spike in carbon monoxide, a few good whiffs of which dropped the miners where they stood. This carefully braided story weaves profiles of the men—hard and bitten as nails, fiercely loyal, and, though wise to the ways of rock under intense pressure, not exactly cautionary by nature—into the chronicle of the disaster’s progress. An evacuation got half of the them to the surface, but many of their brethren suffocated in poisonous gas. Astonishingly, two men way down at 4,800 feet survived for a week after they found a clear patch with water. Nasty scapegoating of the men by the mine owners and the Bureau of Mines ignored the fact that the principal culprit was a flammable urethane foam already banned in England. Olsen’s narrative is brisk and often grim: “One crewman had to puncture a corpse with a pick to drain the gases and fluids so it could be put into the bag.” Wisely, however, he chooses not to whip the morbidity into a froth. He also details the consoling, positive fallout from the tragedy: the creation of the first federal agency solely responsible for mine safety and an array of new rules to preclude the obvious failures at play in the Sunshine incident.
Puts the human faces of dozens of miners their kinfolk on a grave mining disaster. (5 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-609-61016-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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