| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock That Changed the World. By Dan Rottenberg. (New York: Routledge, 2003. xvii, 327p. Illustrations, chronology, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
No American industry has, at once, been wrought with so much peril for so many, been so destructive to the landscape and environment, and so divergent in the interests of labor and capital yet also so incredibly profitable for a select few and so necessary for human survival and economic growth as coal mining. Dan Rottenberg reminds us of the contrasts that are at the heart of the coal mining story.	1
Rottenberg traces the history of these contrasts mainly through the stories of two families. The capitalist Leisenring family were among the original investors in coal mining in Pennsylvania's anthracite region in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their coal empire continued and expanded westward well into the twentieth century. The working-class Givens family of Virginia's bituminous coalfields earned a basic living—and sometimes suffered tragic consequences—supplying the nation's insatiable appetite for coal.	. . .

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