Smokestacks and Black Diamonds: A History of Carbon County, Pennsylvania [Paperback]

Joan Campion (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Center for Canal History & (March 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930973194
• ISBN-13: 978-0930973193
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,740,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Campion (1940- ) was born in Pennsylvania's "Dutch" country, and grew up in a valley of farms which has since been nearly obliterated by shopping centers and housing developments. Her family was not deeply involved with its Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, but she has become more interested in it with the passing years. Today she sometimes refers to herself as "Anglo-Pennsylvania Dutch."
Always interested in history, she was stunned as a very young child by her first encounter with news of the Nazi Holocaust. Her first published book was "In The Lion's Mouth: Gisi Fleischmann and the Jewish Fight For Survival". This was followed by "Smokestacks and Black Diamonds", a widely admired history of her native Carbon County. Most recently she has put out "Jerusalem Journal: Adventures In a Desert Landscape", which she describes as a "historical travel memoir that a lot of people have enjoyed".
Campion is working on a memoir on her youth in the now-"developed" (i.e., destroyed) Mahoning Valley.
She loves to read history and fantasy--anything, she says "that will take me to exotic places no road leads to."
Places, in short, like Middlearth and Ancient Rome.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bringing the past to life, May 15, 2003

By 

Len Barcousky (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Smokestacks and Black Diamonds: A History of Carbon County, Pennsylvania (Paperback)

I was born in Coaldale, Carbon County. I grew up in Slatington, only a few miles from the Carbon County line, and spent some of the best hours of my boyhood tramping along the Appalachian Trail through the Lehigh Gap. That explains my personal interest in "Smokestacks and Black Diamonds: A History of Carbon County, Pennsylvania."
It doesn't explain how much I enjoyed the well-chosen photos and well-written essays in the book. The volume also reminded me of how much I didn't know about the county of my birth.
Author-editor Joan Campion does an excellent job of combining her own writing and that of contributors like Lance Metz and Rita Plotnicki to tell the story of Carbon County's industrial, agricultural and cultural heritage. I can't say too much about the selection of photos by George Harvan, who dedicated his professional life to capturing coal-mining on film.
If you like local history, you will enjoy this book. If you have had the good fortune to have lived or worked in the area, your enjoyment will be doubled.