Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Elsie Lavender and Homer Hickam (the father of the author) were high school classmates in the West Virginia coalfields, graduating just as the Great Depression began. When Homer asked for her hand, Elsie instead headed to Orlando where she sparked with a dancing actor named Buddy Ebsen (yes, that Buddy Ebsen). But when Buddy headed for New York, Elsie's dreams of a life with him were crushed and eventually she found herself back in the coalfields,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality "seems akin to a ticking bomb." "I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where...
Language
English
Description
At the beginning of the 20th century, coal was the engine of American industrial progress. Nearly three quarters of a million men across the country spent ten or twelve hours a day underground in coal mines. The Mine Wars brings to life the struggle that turned the coalfields of southern West Virginia into a blood-soaked war zone where basic constitutional rights and freedoms were violently contested.
Author
Language
English
Description
"Trampoline, a debut novel by Robert Gipe, is set in the coalfields of Kentucky. Its narrator is Dawn Jewell, a teenager who recounts the turbulent time when her grandmother Cora led her into a fight to stop a mountaintop removal coal mine. Dawn's father, Delbert, is dead, killed in the mines, leaving her mother, Tricia, a grieving drunk. Trampoline follows Dawn as she decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by...
Author
Language
English
Description
The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic investigation into the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coalfields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where "America's best friend" is not merely a fuel but a "heritage." Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed-out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water, makes covert tours of mountaintop removal mines, gathers accounts of...