5 comments about Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster.

1. The writer of this book does such a good job in painting the picture of lives of these in this book about life and the dangers of coal mining!



2. This is a great book. Many of these reviewers made an assumption and assertion that the author created the dialogue and thoughts. Those reviewers are wrong. The author interviewed survivors and, more importantly, listened to hours of detailed interviews with the survivors recorded immediately after the rescue and in the following years. From the author: "This book is nonfiction. I did not make up these words, scenes, or stories. They are events I learned from the voices of survivors, and I have tried my best to retell them using the same words."



3. The basic facts of this book's content - the event surrounding the Spring Hill Mine rescue have been covered in other reviews and I will not waste time rehashing them yet again. Instead I would like to focus upon the less obvious gems within this book that in my opinion transend the amzing story of survival.
   
   Melissa Green takes the reader on a journey not just into a coal mine, but into life in this working class town in 1958. The families, the marriages and the race relations all form a familiar image for those who like myself lived in or near the same time frame(in my case as a child) except that this book provided me an understanding of my parent's world. While my father wasn't a miner or ever a manual laborer nevertheless the men of the mine matched up with faces and families of those I grew up with in a world long lost to history. Of solid men who took care of their families, saved, and yet know how to have fun.
   
   Beyond that personal appeal the medium of the story takes us with the trapped men and allows us to expereince their empotions. Somehow inspite of the fact we know it is coming the disaster seems as fresh and unexpected as it was to the men who also knew that some day there would be the "big one" and prayed they wouldn't be inside when it happened.
   
   The aftermath leaves the reader choking on coal dust and shaken by the sight of crushed men whom they have just gotten to know. Unlike some writers the author doesn't pretty it up and the all the horror and mental trauma of the men is ours to share. We also share through the men's thoughts, thoughts of children and the future they now realize they will never see, thoughts of wives whom they will never hold and the constant and never ending question of what will it be like when death comes? Like so many of us who take life's little pleasures for granted, this disaster brings into focus for these trapped and dying men the value of those things and people they took for granted.
   
   Lie in the coal black mine on a bed of broken rock while thirst unlike anything you have ever known treatens to drive you out of your mind. Realize your pants can't stay up because you've lost so much weight and understand that you can't last, can't live much longer. Then return to thoughts of your parched throat that feels as if it is filled with a splintery wooden stake that keeps "being twisted and twisted."
   
   A harrowing and personal experience. Well done! Well done indeed!



4. There seems to be a new writing style out there that is a cross between fiction and non-fiction (not faction), so let's call this style "soap opera non-fiction". That's where an author takes a historical event, and trys to write it like a "soap opera". The last two books I've bought have done this. I guess the object is to make the book appealling to more readers and therefore make more money.

   This was a fascinating story that could have been better told if it was written from a documentary or historical perspective. I wanted to learn something, not read a made-for-TV movie.

   I still don't know how the Governor of Georgia and his exploits fits in this story? That is a bizzare and dis-jointed side-story. She somehow tried to tie-in perceived racial incidents surrounding this tradgedy.

   I was dissappointed in this book.




5. This is really two stories, the Springhill mine disaster and the political exploitation of the survivors. Oddly, the latter is more absorbing. The account of the mine disaster could have used a stronger editorial hand. There are a great many characters introduced at the beginning of the book, but the discriptions tended to be repetitive so that they were not well delineated. There were a few copy errors that should have been caught (a spring night in October; the maple leaf flag being raised several years before it was created....) Worst was the purple prose. The author seems addicted to similies, often using at least one in each paragraph, and many were so strained that they broke the flow of the narrative. If you remember the old comic strip "Our Boarding House," you will understand what I mean. Fortunately the writing improves as the book goes on, but this 280 page book would have been better if it had been boiled down to 200 pages.

No comments about A Mountain Year: Nature Diary of a Wilderness Dweller.

No comments about Picking Up The Pieces.

1 comments about Winged Warfare - In World War I.

1. Even for a measly dollar, I expect a properly-formatted document. The title of this work reads, on my Kindle, "Winged Warfare & # 4 5 ; in World War I". And, every second or third line of text is only a word or two long. On a device like the Kindle, the reader would have to turn the page every 2-3 seconds due to all the wasted space. This is too awkward for me to even make the attempt.
   
   If the publishers ever reformat this book to the point where it can actually be read without unreasonable inconvenience, I very much look forward to discovering what the great Mr. Bishop has to say about aerial war. As things are, the work is simply not in a digestible form.

No comments about Man of the World: Memoirs of Europe, Asia & North America (1930s to 1980S) (1930s to 1980s).

No comments about The Canadians: Biographies of a Nation Omnibus.

1 comments about 163256: A Memoir of Resistance (Life Writing).

1. It is with great sadness that i tell you of the passing of this wonderful man.
   He was my grandfather and i urge you to read this story......it is the story of my family and how he chose to make us his.
   xo
   jenny-bea englishman

No comments about Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists.

No comments about They Loved to Play: Memories of the Golden Age in Canadian Music.

1 comments about A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King (Goodread Biographies).

1. Attentive students will recall that Prime Minister King was a bit odd, perhaps a mild eccentric, but this book will throw the door wide open. Essentially, WLM King was a loon. He obsessed over his mother and submitted to her control to the point where his visions of her ghost still guided him. King was a mystic, who engaged in seances and table-rapping to communicate with such "advisors" as his mother, Wilfrid Laurier, FDR, and other sympathetic spectres. If only people knew what was running through his mind every time he glanced at a clock, or took his dog for a walk... A very revealing book about a very mysterious man.