RECKONING AT EAGLE CREEK

Reviewed 6/23/2011

Reckoning at Eagle Creek, by Jeff Biggers

Access to this book courtesy of the
San Jose, CA Public Library
RECKONING AT EAGLE CREEK
The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
Jeff Biggers
New York: Nation Books, 2010

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 978-1-56858-421-8
ISBN-10 1-56858-421-0 300pp. HC/BWI $26.95

Errata

Page 2: "As a community organizer in Chicago's South Side, President Obama must have wondered about the origins of the coal that fired up the Fisk generating station in his neighborhood. Despite a rack of violations, the coal-fired stack and its nearby counterparts billowed out thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide emissions, as well as 117 tons of particulate matter that led to an estimated 300 heart attacks and 14,000 asthma attacks every year."
  This is unconscionably vague. How much was due to the Fisk plant alone? We cannot tell. How near were those "nearby counterparts"? We cannot tell. How is the "rack of violations" apportioned among the various coal plants, and how many illnesses can fairly be allocated to each? We cannot tell.
Page 6: "It had been drafted in the 1970s to sell the illusory "clean coal" cars and their coal-to-liquid gas plants..."
  Wording: I think this S/B "coal-to-liquid plants".
Page 7: "Caving in to the demands of the still-powerful coal lobby, millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies would be handed over to Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal company, and ExxonMobil..."
  Dangling participle: S/B "Illinois would hand over millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to".
Page 15: "It wasn't until after I spent years trudging behind him in the hollows, or climbing up death-defying rock faces, or..."
  Wording: S/B "making death-defying climbs up rock faces". It's not the rock faces that defy death, but the climbs or the climbers.
Page 17: "His wife, an Audubon member, also had a subscription to the United Mine Workers newsletter—don't you?"
  No, Jeff, I don't.1 (Also, "Audubon" S/B "Audubon Society".)
Page 17: "...Gary liked to subversively treat the deer to corn in his patch of protected woods."
  Wording: What's subversive about this?
Page 17: "It wasn't until after I spent years trudging behind him in the hollows, or climbing up death-defying rock faces, or..."
  Wording: S/B "making death-defying climbs up rock faces". It's not the rock faces that defy death, but the climbs or the climbers.
Page 23: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, author Milan Kundera wrote about his native Prague. 'Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.' "
  Wording: S/B "is". The negative makes it nonsense.
Page 30: "Coal was so prevalent that my uncle recalled feeding slack coal to the pigs, who gobbled it up like a furnace."
  Really?
Page 34: "Life had moved on; gas-generated furnaces had replaced the coal-burners."
  Wording: S/B "gas-operated" perhaps.
Page 48: "With proper compensation, as the bureaucrats who served the eviction notices to seventh-generation elderly homeowners, liked to say."
  Extra comma: S/B "homeowners liked".
Page 112: "Perhaps the oldest upheaval in the heartland, dating back to the formation of the Appalachian and Ozark mountains, the craggy Horseshoe ridge and its series of bluffs and hollows looked southeast into Eagle Creek."
  Capitalization: S/B "Horseshoe Ridge".
Page 120: "Historical plats and maps were consulted..."
  Wording: S/B "plates".
Page 121: "Taylor had been a Revolutionary soldier, but maimed somehow, so he..."
  Wording: S/B "Revolutionary War soldier, but got maimed somehow".
Page 132: "Thin as a railroad tie, Hovie had a way of..."
  I don't think of a railroad tie as something that's thin.
Page 136: "Gob piles emanated the quiet hum of energy."
  Gob piles are heaps of coal waste. They might emanate pollutants. They might even burn, emitting toxic smoke. But "the quiet hum of energy"? No. Biggers must mean something else.
Page 137: "...and crawled into the cage that would transport him from the fall of 1950 to the lower Pennsylvania bedrock of coal..."
  Wording: S/B "the lower Pennsylvanian".
Page 141: "...Murray's use of retreat mining, the dangerous process of knocking the pillars in the deep mines..."
  Missing word: S/B "knocking down the pillars".
Page 142: "...when another part of the mine caved-in."
  Unwanted hyphen: S/B "caved in".
Page 157: "Today, Peabody Energy is the world's largest coal provider, producing over 250 million tons of coal a year; it announced a record eightfold profit for its last quarter of 2008."
  Missing word: S/B "a record eightfold profit increase".
Page 163: "It made Ben Brinkley laugh. On his front lawn in Harrisburg, he sat by a pond with various types of tropical fish..."
  Ben Brinkley raises tropical fish in Illinois? Outside in a pond?
Page 169: "Bombs and stacks of dynamite were detonated."
  Word choice: S/B "sticks".
Page 186: "...and a 10-ton chunk of coal, measuring more than nine-by-five feet, was hailed..."
  Hyphenation: S/B "nine feet by five feet".
Pages 225-6: "In truth, this 'clean coal' charade had more to do with another campaign, back in the cold winter of 1992." And several paragraphs later: "What to do? By 1895, newspapers ran ads for smoke-free 'clean coal'..."
  We know that so-called "clean coal" goes back a long way. But this is another case of "temporal whiplash."
Pages 227-8: Long before the black rock reached a coal-fired plant, it still had to be mined, cleaned and processed, trucked and transported, and then burned with coal ash."
  This sentence makes only partial sense. I would rewrite it thus: "Long before the black rock reached a coal-fired plant, it still had to be mined, cleaned and processed, trucked and transported. Then it was burned to coal ash, which had to be disposed of somehow."
Page 230: "As the poster child for strip mining's worst depravations, mountaintop removal in Appalachia..."
  Word choice: S/B "depredations" or "depravities".
Page 253: "...parent company Massey had demonstrated a merciless coveting for coal at any expense."
  Wording: S/B "coveting of coal". (Or is this a dialect expression?)
Page 259: "From the coal-fired plants fed by our insatiable demand for coal..."
  Word choice: S/B "power".
1 But if you buy me one, I promise to read every issue.
Valid CSS! Valid HTML 4.01 Strict To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.
Copyright © 2011-2016 Christopher P. Winter. All rights reserved.
This page was last modified on 3 April 2016.