The descendant of Centralia, Penn., miners, former Miami Herald reporter Quigley reveals the moral complexities and political machinations surrounding the underground fires that virtually destroyed this small Pennsylvania town.
She begins in 1981, when a schoolboy slipped into a Centralia sinkhole and was nearly killed by the underground heat and toxic fumes. The narrative then retreats to Memorial Day 1962, when a blaze that began at the town dump moved underground to ignite the underlying seams of coal. The ensuing decades brought ineffectual remedies, illness, public outcry, political shape-shifting and finger-pointing. Locals emerged as heroes, heretics, Cassandras and curmudgeons. Villains appeared, too—mostly, in the author’s view, Reagan-era functionaries trying to reconcile their political philosophy (government is bad) with Centralia’s poisonous and fiery realities. Quigley records Gov. Richard Thornburgh’s highly emotional 1981 visit and blasts feckless Interior Secretary James Watt repeatedly. The media both helped and hurt. People magazine wanted—and got—a photograph of a local man frying eggs over one of the vents; Nightline swooped into town in the early 1980s; but then the press went home and forgot about it all. Quigley conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with residents and read alpine stacks of government reports, newspapers and magazines as part of her massive research effort. She sadly records the split in the community between those who wanted the government to pay for relocation and those who intended to stay no matter what. Ultimately, the town voted for relocation, the federal government provided some funds and most of the principals in the story moved on. But not all: About a dozen resolute folk remain, while tongues of fire continue to lick below.
First-rate research and journalism combine to tell a sad, often infuriating tale.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6180-6
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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