![]() ![]() ![]() Its finest ambitions are artistic, and it is hard to see that it has any political aims at all except the ancient and honorable one of discovering injustice and holding it up to the pitiless witness of history.Īnd its artistic ambitions are beautifully vindicated. The mine guards-who were mostly criminals from Chicago and called “gun thugs” by the mountaineers-killed strikers and their children indiscriminately and often raped the women before murdering them too.Ī reader is likely to come away from “Storming Heaven” in a fury of helpless indignation, but this is no propaganda novel. The Army used poison gas against the workers and bombed them from airplanes. After valiant bloody struggle with local and state police and with mine guards paid by the coal companies, the miners lost their battle when President Warren G. ![]() Giardina has written a historical novel about the Battle of Blair Mountain, which occurred in West Virginia in 1921, when 10,000 striking miners attempted to take control of the corrupt governments of two counties. To these titles must now be added Denise Giardina’s “Storming Heaven.” It is a brilliant diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, heartwarming, tough and tender. Ibelieve I am correct in saying that critical consensus has named James Still’s “River of Earth” and John Yount’s “Hardcastle” as the classic novels about coal mining in the southern Appalachian mountains. ![]()
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