17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tallying the True Cost of "Cheap" Coal, February 24, 2010
This review is from: Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Hardcover)
As the Prophet Isaiah queried: "What will you do on the Day of Reckoning, when evil comes from afar?"
Having just completed my first reading of Jeff Biggers' masterfully crafted, meticulously researched "Reckoning At Eagle Creek," I am left feeling nigh-breathless at the scope of the evil that came from afar and visited a nigh-Biblical plague upon people in the form of the heartache, sickness and grim Death that always serves as the handmaiden of coal. Such a sensation is fitting, I suppose, for a book that recounts the history of the thousands of human beings rendered breathlessly mute by the ravages of Black Lung, slate falls, mine explosions, poisoned waters, blasted hills, choked valleys, murdered workers and whole communities literally blown off the map in the merciless, ceaseless quest for the Holy Profit of Coal.
Jeff Biggers has crafted out of family history and regional history an honest, unblinking reckoning of the costs paid by a nation and, indeed, a world for what we have been assured by the industry for more than a century is "cheap" coal. Mr. Biggers proves in the pages of "Reckoning At Eagle Creek" that the only way to see coal as "cheap" is to view the lives, history and heritage consumed in its acquisition as being even cheaper still.
"Reckoning At Eagle Creek" is the manifestation of one man's quest for understanding of where our dependence on the nastiest fuel form on the planet has taken us and where that path ultimately leads. That quest is neither fanciful nor mythical. It is rock-hard and bone-real. With its publication, "Reckoning At Eagle Creek" becomes an immediately necessary resource for anyone who seeks to understand the ever-increasing toll we all pay for "cheap" coal, for "cheap" electricity, for "cheap" heat. In his "reckoning" of accounts within the scope of his family's southern Illinois homeland, Jeff Biggers honestly reveals coal mineshafts and stripmine pits for what they are: the abbatoirs of the American Dream.
Read this book. Own this book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Poetic, March 30, 2010
This review is from: Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Hardcover)
How can such a heartbreaking story be such a pleasure to read? The use of language is as lovely and rich as the landscape that's destroyed for the sake of greed. Our grandchildren and great grandchildren will read this book and wonder how we could rape, pillage, and plunder the place and the people for cheap coal and maximum "profit".
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Legacy of "cheap" Illinois coal, November 11, 2010
This review is from: Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Hardcover)
This is the third of the books I have read over the past few years about the coal industry's less than positive contribution to our lives. I have yet to see a pro-coal book interesting enough to pick up, but what is there to learn? Coal is cheap and plentiful to one degree or another, and most of us do enjoy our electrically powered computers, appliances, climate control, etc.
This book is different from
Big Coal and
Lost Mountain because Biggers has a personal, ancestral connection to the area around Eagle Creek that has now been strip mined for coal. This book is as much a recounting of his search for the past as it is a treatise on the problems of coal mining and burning. Yet, it is not without its insights: notably, Biggers exposes the links between coal and legal or tolerated slavery in Illinois long after the state was declared "free," and he discusses with disdain the history of this idea of "clean coal" (FutureGen is not the first technology described as such).
My love of mountains and the coal industry's love of removing mountaintops to get to the coal underneath in the least expensive way possible do not seem compatible, nor am I impressed when hiking around a strip mine reclaimed into a half-hearted state park. However, Illinois coal is supposed to be pretty uncontroversial other than its high sulfur content (which FutureGen would supposedly solve). Reckoning at Eagle Creek shows that coal mining does not need to involve mountaintop removal or carbon dioxide emissions to be disturbing and harmful.
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