Customer Reviews

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

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3 star:		(1)
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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.

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".

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.

This book was born out of the author's anguish at the near-total destruction, by strip mining, of his ancestral community at Eagle Creek in southeastern Illinois. The book is part elegy, part polemic, melded gracefully into a single compelling story. Biggers makes a convincing case that coal can be regarded as "cheap" only by ignoring external costs: destruction of the landscape that anchors memory, carnage among the work force, pollution of air and water, that the political power of the coal companies has enabled them to omit from the announced price tag. Although the book begins and ends at Eagle Creek, it makes a wide circuit through the history of coal mining, with an especially heart-breaking riff on removal of mountaintops in West Virginia. The one discordant note is provided by the book's invocation of "global warming/climate change" theory in the last chapter. Whether the author was actually a member of the cult when the book was written back in 2009, or simply seized on this stuff as a convenient club with which to beat the coal companies, is unclear, but inclusion of this material, now that the hoax has begun to unravel, gives the last part of the book a somewhat dated, archaic quality. Nevertheless, despite his being partially wrong-footed by events, Biggers has still assembled an overwhelming case, persuasively argued. This is an important book. Will anybody listen?

This book was a selection for the Morton Arboretum Book Club for May 2011. It was very interesting to hear the reactions to this book. As citizens of Illinois, we were shocked to learn of the story of coal in our state and it's sad legacy. There is such a disjoint between turning on the lights and knowing where the energy comes from or how difficult it is to obtain.

Almost all of our group appreciated reading this book and found it very engaging however unsettling. It is a thoroughly researched clarion call for environmental and humanistic values. You can get a flavor of it from some of the videos on Jeff Biggers website: [...]

The Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh said, "Understanding and love are interdependent. Love is made of understanding, and understanding is made of love." I can't think of a truer epigram for Jeff Bigger's body of work, including this book and his previous The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America, both deeply satisfying explorations. When you care about a place and the people who live there and who are buried there, as Biggers obviously does, then you're drawn into the history -- you dream of going on long walks with the old timers who know the stories, of discovering old letters, old cemeteries. In this book you get to hang out with Biggers as he takes these walks and hears these old stories from people like Barney Bush of the Vinyard Indian Settlement, Baptist preacher Ron Nelson, and ex-miner Rick Abbie, and as he follows the threads of history back into the days when African American and Shawnee slaves worked the mines of southern Illinois. With all due respect to the reviewer who expressed disappointment that Jeff is a member of the climate change "cult," or a follower of a "hoax" that has now "begun to unravel": I don't think this is a fair characterization. The evidence that fossil fuel emissions and land use changes are dangerously shifting the climate has now been endorsed by the national science academies of Canada, China, France, Brazil, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For those interested in the history of the "denialist" position, and the specific oil, mining, and utility companies that have funded it (using the same "deny/delay" playbook used by the tobacco industry to resist the smoking/cancer link), I recommend Naomi Oreskes excellent history Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Or, for those who prefer a video, here's Professor Oreskes lecturing at the University of Rhode Island: [...]

"Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland" is a personal journey of author Jeff Biggers. Biggers goes on a "vision quest" back to Eagle Creek in southern Illinois to report on what strip mining coal has done to his family's historic farmstead and to the larger region.

The historical context of this region, a region often referred to as the "Illinois Ozarks" provides the basis for his narrative. In the best parts of his narrative, Biggers includes a history of the Shawnee Indians who were prominent in the area, the early salt trade, the competing interests of the French and English as traders and settlers moved through and into the area. His own family's history as a settlement-era pioneering family is brought into the narrative.

Biggers introduces the concept of "historicide," which is the elimination of the effects of human habitation on the land when the entire landscape is destroyed. In large-scale strip mining, the impact on forest, farm and field is total destruction.

Also known as "Little Egypt" and so-named because this part of southern Illinois is where the Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers all come together, this is a geographic region with its own topography, a limestone geology with sinkholes and caves, an area once part of a large, inland sea. Depending on your view, Mother Nature either blessed or cursed this area with plentiful seams of accessible bituminous coal.

I enjoyed reading this book and got a good sense of place and of the impact of coal mining upon it. However, the impact of "Reckoning at Eagle Creek" is weakened by a lot of rambling, an excessively loose organizational structure and a lack of sharp editing to reduce redundant narrative. Many of the same statistics and arguments show up in successive chapters.

I am prepared to offer four stars for the content but only three stars for the organization and structure.