Customer Reviews

Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado's Company Towns, 1890-1930

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is my rebutal to the ill advised likely a bit youthful fantsy or drug induced "review"posted. This is a book about people many Americans who worked the coalfields (mines) of Colorado the late 19th and early 20th century.The reviewer is likely "on drugs" or worse. It's(the book)about people;mostly immigrants as my famiy who worked in the mines and died in the hundreds but many of their children went on to become America......

The negative review should have never been printed as it is not a review but some likely racist and sad soul playing around with a serious facet of how America was formed into what we are today.

It is an honorable and important book that documents life that was harsh but full of promise for America: coal was fuel;fuel equated America's future: to supply the world with the tools to stop wars of aggression.......

it is simple:how the West was won.........

Joe "Doc"

son of a coalminer;grandson and more.....

My octogenarian aunt, who grew up in these towns, was delighted to find the lives of her parents and childhood companions described so thoughtfully. This is an important contribution to the history of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain west, and it deserves serious attention.

The part about the 10 year old wrapping himself up in chicken wire and falling down off the picnic table was too much for me to bear!. Thank God he landed on his head. Author Clyne is a genius.

You definately need to get a life. You should have reviewed the book BEFORE you bought it.

Mr. Berkowitz sounds like another of those kind of people that are not used to living indoors in the winter and never regularly seeing the inside of a shower while it's in operation. In general, a tree-hugging, hippie environmentalist of the wrong kind.

I have had time to more fully explore the nuanced "Coal People", but only because I spent five years in Pelican Bay for creating what the state of CA considers a "Ponzi scheme". Whatever.

That time allowed me to really pull apart Coal People. Reading it also gave me the chance to cross pollinate reference materials, so my reading list grew to include such titles as "the amethyst hominid's", "ignatious rocks: how eigth grade earth science teacher's are ruining the study of geology", "sentimental sediment: an alliterative primer for budding geologists" and finally, "core values: a journey into the center of the earth" by Pat Robertson.

What these books teach us, quite frankly, is not much. Coal People, in retrospect, did a much better job, from a layman's perspective, of allowing us, from a distance, to learn how to avoid, at all costs, the overruse of comma's.

Going forward, one hopes author Clyne will revisit his subject and delve deeper into precisely why one would opt to be a 'coal person'. Until he does, however, the choices listed above could prove interesting.

I bought this book thinking it was a sci fi book. I thought it was going to be about people made of coal who go around doing stuff that people made of coal would do. Author Clyne really misleads with his title. If the book included chapters where the Coal People go back in time and do stuff like climb into peoples furnaces and burn themselves and stuff, that'd be one thing. Instead, this book deals with stuff about a group of people Clyne refers to as "Italians". Whatever. All the pictures of these so called Italians showed these swarthy, dirty, ragged bunch of toothless hags, and those were just the pics of the babies. The women and older people were horrendous to even look at. Next time i buy a book like this I'm gonna read the sub title part, the part about mining towns in Southern Colorado. I'm thinking that Clyne ought to write another book, maybe one dealing with Anthracite or some other kind of mineral. What about people that dig for diamonds? That boring enough for you? It is for me. Ever notice how books about gold mining aren't on the best sellers list? Of course you do. The reason? They're BORING!

Clyne, go back to your drawing board and come up with some cool science fiction stuff dealing with people made of minerals mined from the earth. Now THAT"S interesting.