I thought some of you might be interested in this. I was just browsing
yesterday's additions to BARD and I noticed that Storming Heaven by
Denise Giardina was added. That is an historical novel about the West
Virginia coal war of the 1920s. It was considered to be the biggest
uprising in the United States since the civil war. When I read it I did
notice that the novel combined two historical events into one, but if
you know anything about those two events you will see that they are both
accurate except that the Matewan massacre and the march on Blair
Mountain were in real history geographically separated. The novel is of
great interest to me because, for one thing, it takes place in certain
locations that are very familiar to me. For example, when Giardina
needed two characters to just happen to run into each other they did so
in a bar on Court Street in Charleston. The bars are no longer on Court
Street, but they were into my own lifetime. Now, a major entrance to a
shopping mall is there and I have been on Court Street many times. Many
of the outlying areas where the action takes place are also very
familiar to me and I spent a lot of time in them when I was a political
activist. There is also a lot of reference to historical events that
have been almost lost. At least they are not in many history books. For
example, there is reference to the United States government flying
planes over the miners and dropping bombs on them. The author, by the
way, is the founder of the Mountain Party in West Virginia which now is
pretty much the West Virginia Green Party. If any of you are interested
in this novel the DB number is DB26668.