Word: coal
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...Sizemore is a coal miner who has practically no money and lives in a rented house in Appalachia, where the hallow he lives in is choked in a layer of "red dog" coal slag left by the strippers for "surface miners," as the industry calls them). He's been broke more than once, drives a '68 Ford after going three years without one and wheezes like a train when he walks around because he has second-stage black lung. He lives in a place where school teachers quote from the National Enquirer and where the deputy sheriff pistol-whipped...
...YEARS--except for one time, a crucial time because it couches the explanation George Vecsey gives for why this coal miner literally has a jar of moonshine in one hand and a copy of Das Kapital in the other. Vecsey had to get at this somehow, because Sizemore is no quintessential miner-mountaineer. Yet he is not freak show, either. How could this socialist grow out of these barren hills? It has something to do with being suddenly laid off for nine months during the fifties, having some time to think, and making a decision. The tragedy of Appalachia--which...
Vecsey makes certain that he's not showing us an oddity in this "Story of a Coal Miner," and he tells how Sizemore deals with his fellow workers in a locker-room sort of way (Vecsey, who used to be a sportswriter until he went to cover Appalachia for The New York Times, gets into the camaraderie of the miners' bathhouse). But the powerful images are still the pistol whipping, and the time one of Dan Sizemore's neighbors shot the dog belonging to his retarded son (Blackie, as Vecsey tells us several times), and the silent looks when they...
...vehicle cuts its life in half driving on it every day (when the execs visit they drive company cars, and the road isn't even scraped anymore since the superintendent got a helicopter). The drive takes 45 minutes. When they jolt to the end. Dan Sizemore points out the coal train that hauls thousands of tons through a cement tunnel and out to society. In ten minutes the boxcars will pass within a quarter of a mile of the Sizemore's house. "Tells you where we stand," he says...
...queer objective tone about the gulf between him and Dan Sizemore. It is Sunday, and we have been with the miner and his family all week long, and longer. The book began with Dan Sizemore defending his two packs of cigarettes a day ("no reason to fear that coal dust") and it is ending with a few too many shorts of home brew. They are arguing furiously about baseball. Vecsey is trying to convince Dan Sizemore that Oakland ball players have more strikes against them than Cincinnati players (the Reds are the mountain team), more of an inferiority complex about...