Customer Reviews

Coal Mountain Elementary

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What Mark Nowak has done in this book is ingenious. He alternates pictures and first person testimony from mining disasters in China & the US with an elementary school curriculum written by the mining industry. It is that juxtaposition that gets the reader in the end. I read the book in one long sitting, picked my heart up off the floor, and read it again. This is something between poetry and journalism, sociology and elegy.

Although I would not pick up this book more than once, it is a worthy experience to read it once just to get the emotional experience of connecting with the horrifying facts about coal mining in our modern society.

I didn't hate this book, but I didn't love it. The different literature types Mark Nowak uses and how he puts them together is very interesting. What irks me is that none of it is originally written by him, just put together by him. He uses pictures that he took, along with Ian Teh. But everything else was just copied and put into his book. Articles from Chinese newspaper, testimony from miners in West Virginia and a curriculum made by the American Coal Foundation.