Word: mineral
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...American dream lived in John Alessio. Son of an impoverished coal miner, he is a grade-school dropout and a onetime bootblack who became a millionaire with diverse interests in banking, real estate and restaurants in California and horse racing, dog racing and legalized bookmaking in Mexico. One of his enterprises was the erection of a twelve-story office building on the very same street in San Diego where he used to shine the shoes of C. Arnholt Smith, a fund-raising friend of Richard Nixon and Alessio's mentor and business associate. Alessio, named "Mr. San Diego...
...puts between hard covers the makings of one of those harrowing, heartwarming 1930s film sagas that used to star Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, attractively but thinly disguised as proletarians on the rise. The time is turn of the century; the place, a Scottish coalpit town complete with oppressed miners, strikes and lockouts, an unfeeling owner and a bloody-minded mine superintendent named Mr. Brothcock. Crichton's story centers on a Scots lass with a will of steel who marries a fine free Highlander, turns him into a miner and plots the escape of their family, the Camerons, from...
...bestseller. Yet The Camerons curiously resembles an autobiographical first novel; its uneven scenes are sometimes sheer cardboard, sometimes compelling. Easy complaints about slickness, commerce and sentimentality, though, do not do justice to the great affection and knowledge that Crichton shows. His description of a starved, out-of-work miner treating himself to one golden, fabulously self-indulgent, perfectly boiled egg would splinter a heart...
...campaign has been turbulent. A third-generation miner who speaks in a soft, hoarse voice and suffers from the dreaded "black lung" disease of the pits, Candidate Miller, 50, carries a big stick-specifically, a shotgun beneath the seat of his car. He never hits the campaign trail without an armed bodyguard, while he ventures into pro-Boyle precincts that Yablonski stayed away from. He means to come back alive, which is why he keeps his schedule a secret. "They are not going to know where I'll be," Miller says, "and I won't be where they...
Gradually Miller is making his point that the average miner is the chief victim of U.M.W. complacency and corruption. He flails Boyle and the staff of U.M.W. headquarters in Washington for fancy living and disregard of the rank and file. "The U.M.W. hierarchy owns 16 Cadillacs," he complains, "and we're gonna auction 'em off." If elected, Miller promises to cut the union president's salary from $50,000 a year to $35,000. "I'd like to go out to the coal fields and say to some miner: 'Here, old timer, here...