OUT OF THE DUST

A kaleidoscope of Reata, and LaCieneguita, the village on its outskirts where the Spanish speaking coal miners live, mirroring all those involved in the riot which has broken out, after a strike and some unmentioned land deals leading to eviction, and resulted in the killing of a sheriff and the escape of a prisoner, Arce. The fomert between the members of a Communist group, the law and the townspeople continues to seethe; a lawyer and his wife come from Los Angeles to help the accused; the newspaper stories spread the contagion with lurid misdirection; the ""peasants"" live their two lives -- in English and their own tongues; the individual lives are in conflict to their public actions; the hunt for a gun is a link between all the stories. A sprawling panorama, in which the ""truth of the matter"" lies hidden in the hates and fears, the clash between the color of skins and the color of politics and the human equation of personal problems. This is the second of a trilogy, Morning Noon And Night (1954) was the first, which cuts through the sociological, economical and culture patterns of a non-homogeneous grouping to give the personal climate of the issues involved as it continues the story begun in the earlier book.