Customer Reviews

Storming Heaven: A Novel (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series)

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And I've read a LOT of books. This is one of the few books I'veread that will have me laughing until my sides ache in one chapter,crying until I can't see the pages in another, and ready to go on aprotest march in the next.

Storming Heaven is an exhaustively researched, historically accurate, and utterly compelling story of the Battle of Blair Mountain, WV in 1921. It's the story of an armed conflict between coal miners and the hired gunhands who represented the coal operators. It's a story of how the United States government turned on its own people, looking away when women and children were murdered in cold blood, sending troops into the valleys and dropping bombs on the mountains.

And if the story itself isn't stirring enough, Giardina writes some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. The mountains are *alive* in her books.

My copy of Storming Heaven is so dog-eared and highlighted that I'll soon need to replace it. I am astounded that a couple of others have rated this book a 'hard read'. Compared to what? Danielle Steele?

Hailing from the coal regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania, when I learned of this title, I quickly ordered a copy and read it within a day and a half. I could not put it down, and, in fact, kept returning to passages because Giardina's prose is brilliant. The characters are so alive that I was actually upset to end the book and lose Carrie Bishop as a friend. Being a writer, I am in awe of Giardina. In fact, off I go to read the other Giardina book I ordered, "The Unquiet Earth." Anyone from coal country, be it NE PA's anthracite field or coal country in other locations, will readily identify with this story for its historical worth. Reading it is like listening to tales as told by our great-grandparents who worked in the damp,dark underground and their families, who toiled above.

This book tells a story, based on actual events, that is little known to those outside of the Appalachian coalfield area. It is told through the eyes of four characters, and is both moving and chilling. The South was built on the backs of slaves, the railroad on the backs of Chinese and other immigrants, but many Americans are unaware that our industrial progress was fueled by the coal out of West Virginia and Kentucky, mined by "mountain folk" who were brutalized by our own government, as well as the coal operators who kept them in abject poverty. A tremendous book.

I am grateful for writers like Denise Giardina, who has added immeasurably to my understanding of the coal-mine town, its company stores, and the many brutal attempts to discourage unionization. These are the people who put themselves on the line for the rest of us, we who in later generations have come to dismiss the incredible hardships involved in starting unions that would stand behind the common laborer who could not be heard. Whole families were engaged in this huge American struggle for decent hours and a living wage, and many were killed in the process. This book is full of the simple people who did their jobs well and didn't ask for much in return. They certainly didn't ask for the state militia to be mustered to shut them up. It is even more outrageous that the United States Government would rain bombs and poison gas upon its own citizens in West Virginia in one of the most shameful events in recent American history. My teachers never told me any of this in school, but they did say to remember that history always repeats itself.

I was absolutely intrigued by a recent write-up in the New Orleans newpaper about Denise Giardina. She grew up Methodist, studied for the Episcopal priesthood and was invited to preach at a local Baptist church. Plus she is currently a "long-shot" candidate for West Virginia Governor running against coal interests. Unfortunately I missed her talk, but I did read "Storming Heaven" and found it to be one of those books that stays with you: ordinary characters who find themselves in tough circumstances. It was so good that I read it in two sittings.

It did remind me of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" in two ways: an ensemble cast with the story being told from multiple points-of-view over time, and as a story about institutions taken to excess (religion in PB and capitalism in SH). However, religion does play a role in "Storming Heaven", but it wasn't preachy. One of the characters was a "Hardshell" Baptist preacher, a likeable, positive character unlike the preacher in "Poisonwood."

Giardina's voice might be called liberal because she is clearly on the side of the union and workers with plenty of heartbreaking examples of abuse from the early coal companies. But abuse of the miners and their families also comes from the U.S. government, which interestingly brings to mind the recent events in Waco, Texas, where our government also besieged and attacked innocent citizens.

Overall, this is a wonderful, well-written book. Gardina is a great storyteller. Read it.

The version of West Virginia history I learned in school as a child never matched the history I learned perched on my daddy's knee. Giardina tells the story of her not-so-distant ancestors, my ancestors, giving a voice to people the rest of America either maligned or ignored for so many decades. She captures the dialect, the manners, and the spirit of these people, telling their story in a way only someone who loves them fiercely could ever manage. Giardina is one of the people who have proven to me that Appalachia is worth writing about, after all.

Between 1910 and 1920, one million people moved to the coal fields of West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Hundreds of thousands of folks who were already there were sucked into the coal mines or run off their lands into the coal mines by the combination of big coporations and the governments they bought from Washington down to each county and town. Some were mountaineers from the region, some were immigrants from Italy, Hungary, and Poland, and some like my grandfather Henry Hudson Jones were Black miners from Alabama who thought they could make more money and have less Jim Crow up there.

This book is the story of those people and the struggles they had with the coal companies and the bosses' government. It is told not historically but in the voice of four different people who are not just examples for history but real people struggling for love, to fit into or get away from their families, and who learning about life.

This is a good read, a page turner that does not need to be melodramatic because the lives of its characters have such real drama.

I enjoyed the way the author tried to inhabit the voice of her characters by having them (with the exception of her Italian character) speak in the language that they would have used. However, I am familiar with that language from people in my family as well as having spent years studying Appalachian folk music. I am not sure how someone not familiar with these varients of English would have found this novel.

I live in Florida, but I am in touch with people in the coal fields. Old mines are being reopened in the Appalachians due to the high price of oil and the cheapness of coal. Mining companies are being set up with the same greed that powered the exploiters described in this novel, often with a get rich at any cost while the oil prices are high approach. There are expanding battles coal miners are facing in the Western coal fields in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming that are now the center of the expansion of the mining industry. Battles are taking place in the West where the new militancy of immigrant workers especially from Mexico has given strength to the UMWA.

Moreover, people in coal areas of Appalachian and no doubt the West, are facing ecological disasters--floods, ruined water, higher risks for cancer and other diseases--as a result of the rapacious way mining was and is being done.

And every year more miners are being killed, more miners are being injured, as safety is disregarded. Unionization a life and death question for miners and their families. Fewer accidents and death take place in mines where the union mobilizes miners to defend their rights to safety and health.

Of course, in a larger sense, all working folks and farmers are up against the same greedy capitalism we see in this novel. We've got no other solution but to get together and realize that we are in a war with the big business system, with the politicians in the Democrat and Republican party supported by that, and we need to follow the example of the fighting miners we read about in Storming Heaven.

After saying all these things about the social and political questions, I want to emphasize that this book sensitively describes the lives of real people, not just in the face of the mines and the struggle but in the real ways we all reach out for love and identity.

This is one where you really feel bad that the book ends. I hope Denise Giardina and other children of the mountains have more like this.

Giardina wove the history of the West Virginia Mine Wars into an eloquent novel, not only entertaining, but informing the reader. The story is heart-rendering in that so many lives are torn apart by the endless greed of coal operators. The heros of the book are many, those Appalachians who stood up for the freedom that had been promised to them. This is one of the best books I have read recently, and I would recommend it to all, particularly if you are interested in an untold story of American history.

As I wrote above I am a coal miners daughter from a small Southern West Virginia town. I am now married to a coal miner as well. First of all I will have to say that I loved this book from beginning to end. The only problem I had with it is that the language is a little hard to understand. I understand some people in West Viriginia talk like this, but most of us do not. But, This book is so amazing and while I was reading it I felt like I was 7 again at my Great-Grandfather's house listening to his many stories about coal mining in the old days. I feel that this is a part of history that often gets looked over. I mean the Battle of Blair Mountain, was the largest labor uprising fought on US Soil. How many people know that? Not many. I read this book my junior year of college in my West Virginia History class. I not only feel like it is great West Virginia history, but American History as well. I can not praise this book enough! Everyone should read it! Thanks so much Ms.Giardina for bringing this tale of the struggles of coal miners to life!

I read this book for a class focused on Appalachian families, and at first I was like, "Oh no. Hillbillies. I don't care..." But this book CHANGED MY LIFE. I laughed, I cried, and one of the characters, Carrie Bishop, became a hero to me. It was amazing. My family is from New York, and I have no ties to Appalachia, so my thinking initially was,"This is not going to interest me." BUT I WAS WRONG!! It doesn't matter who you are or where you are from, this book will captivate you. I can't WAIT to read the sequel The Unquiet Earth.