Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland [Hardcover]

Jeff Biggers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2010

Cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us to the dark amphitheatre ruins of his family’s nearly 200-year-old hillside homestead that has been strip-mined on the edge of the first federally recognized Wilderness Site in southern Illinois. In doing so, he not only comes to grips with his own denied backwoods heritage, but also chronicles a dark and missing chapter in the American experience: the historical nightmare of coal outside of Appalachia, serving as an exposé of a secret legacy of shame and resiliency.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Biggers tallies up the human cost of more than two centuries of coal mining in southern Illinois in an intimate, informative yet uneven book. Part historical narrative, part family memoir, part pastoral paean, and part jeremiad against the abuse of the land and of the men who gave and continue to give their lives to (and often for) the mines, the book puts a human face on the industry that supplies nearly half of America's energy. Biggers excavates the history beneath the homestead at Eagle Creek where his family lived for eight generations. The displacement of the indigenous Shawnee, the hidden legacy of slavery, the bitter and bloody conflicts between miners and their bosses, and the environmental devastation wrought by the mines are detailed as part and parcel of the region's coal-mining history—a history obliterated along with the mountaintops and clean streams scraped away by the miners' steam shovels. Written in a personal and poetic style, the book suffers from poor organization, but it offers a rare historical perspective on the vital yet little considered industry, along with a devastating critique of the myth of clean coal. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Ancestrally connected to hilly southern Illinois, Biggers combines memoir with labor and environmental history in this portrait of the region. Coal-rich, it has been extensively strip-mined; endowed with salt, it drew American settlers in the early 1800s, Biggers’ forebears among them. As a returning native, Biggers writes of his reconnection to the area through locally significant people, among them a man whose project is to revive the Shawnee presence, which permits Biggers to delve into the history of Indian expulsion from what is now the Shawnee National Forest and environs. Meeting others dedicated to preserving local history, such as a publisher of a local magazine, gives Biggers his entrée to places and stories pertinent to the history of Illinois’ coal-mining industry. Alighting upon union organizers such as Mother Jones (whose grave is in Illinois), strikes, mining accidents, and sundry operations of mining companies, the author lists his many grievances with the coal-mining industry, both for past actions and for future plans, which generates stylistic energy that will impress readers of labor history and contemporary opponents of coal mining. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (January 26, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568584210
• ISBN-13: 978-1568584218
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #464,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, educator, radio correspondent and community organizer across the US, Europe, Mexico and India. Winner of an American Book Award, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award and a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, his work has appeared in scores of magazines, newspapers and national public radio programs. He blogs frequently for the Huffington Post and Grist. His website is www.jeffbiggers.com

Biggers' new book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, is forthcoming in January 2010.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tallying the True Cost of "Cheap" Coal February 24, 2010

By Bob Kincaid

Format: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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Poetic March 30, 2010

By EMom

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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".

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Legacy of "cheap" Illinois coal November 11, 2010

By Matthew Stewart

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.