Undermined in Coal Country: On the Measures in a Working Land

摘要

Marywood University English professor Bill Conlogue's Undermined in Coal Country is an ardent defense of the value of literature and history in knowing one's place in the world. With prose reminiscent of William Least Heat-Moon and John McPhee and the passion for place and profession exhibited by K. Ross Toole, Conlogue deftly demonstrates the power of the liberal arts. He does this by weaving together personal memoir, Pennsy-vania's coal mining history, the history of Marywood University, and works of literature ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Dante's Inferno to the coal mining poetry of Scranton native Thomas Blomain. Conlogue covers a wide variety of topics including coal mining's insatiable appetite for timber, the mules that worked in the mines, anthracite boosting, pillar robbing, mine fires and disasters, immigration and labor, subsidence, mine safety, company towns, bootlegging coal, and the nature of human knowledge.