Word: vecsey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Loretta Lynn, Lynn & Vecsey...
...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...
...Vecsey deeply wants the Sizemore to have a better life, for Dan Sizemore to respect his work. But does he want them to drive a Volvo too? He projects his own cultural alienation onto his subjects. Just as their outsider friends do, as though there's no viable culture in Appalachia. His style suffers for the same reason--the well written and thorough approach to the Sizemores only fails when Vecsey goes into the house and transcribers domestic babbling, the "universals" of home life. Or when he refers to people we already know as the "sensitive...
...FAULTING Vecsey may be a crummy trick, because there is so much here--the people and the context, even if often separated, and in fascinating detail. And maybe the needless universalizing of a local way of life happens because the writer is genuinely moved by people managing to stay human in such dehumanizing circumstances. The first day that Dan Sizemore drives Vecsey to the mine shaft where hundreds work, the reporter is amazed by the roads. Driving through Appalachia plays hell on a car, anyway--mud and garbage all over, trucks barreling around tortuous curves without guard rails, heaved...
...Vecsey might have worked out some of the flaws of perspective in this very fine book if he had put himself into it more. He is silent and unobtrusive throughout, which is fine when he glides into a section about union history or a polemic on strip mining, but we miss knowing what effect he has on the folks he is writing about. He only shows himself in the last few pages, when he writes in a queer objective tone about the gulf between him and Dan Sizemore. It is Sunday, and we have been with the miner...