Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Coal: A Memoir and Critique. By Duane Lockard. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. xvi, 225 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-8139-1784-0.)

Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster. By Alan Derickson. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xviii, 237 pp. $22.95, isbn 0-8014-3186-7.)

Scholars of labor, business, and social medicine history will be interested in these studies of the American coal industry. Both are about power and democracy. 1

Duane Lockard, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, went to work in a coal mine at the age of nineteen. Service in World War II changed the trajectory of his life, but his youth in the coal towns of West Virginia left powerful memories. In Coal: A Memoir and Critique, Lockard uses his store of memories, his family diaries, and a reading of most of the standard works on the subject to craft a frankly partisan critique of the coal industry. His accounts of work, life in company towns, abusive and paternalistic corporate power, and industrial warfare cover terrain familiar to specialists in the field, but his deft weaving in of personal experience adds drama and authority to the narrative. However, Lockard's purpose is not merely to retell the story of American coal mining. Instead, he uses the history of this indispensable and brutal industry for a meditation on corporate power and democracy. . . .

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