“Resnick does an admirable job of breathing life into the story of a small town’s demise and its questioning of whether the disaster could have been avoided.”—Washington Post
“Few accounts have ever done justice to the women, families and communities of coal towns, or depicted their character with such clarity as this book does. The heartrending and yet, in the end, inspiring portraits of actual people willing to battle against a callous industry are skillfully rendered.”—Charleston (WV)Gazette
“Those who enjoy reading history and about the perseverance of the human spirit will not soon forget this story.”—ForeWord Magazine
“Susan Resnick has done a marvelous and very difficult thing. Through her fine research and wonderful prose, she has captured the heart and soul of an American town that was brilliantly alive until the day a sudden disaster all but killed it. How that day came is a matter of documentation, but Resnick is far from satisfied with mere reporting on the life and death of a town. She has dug deep, as deep as the mine beneath Montana that is the centerpiece of this remarkable history. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read about mining and the strong, amazing, enduring people who do it.”—Homer Hickam, author of Rocket Boys and October Sky
“In most history books, disasters—when they are recounted at all—are reduced to numbers. The dead. The cost. But in this remarkable look at a forgotten moment, Susan Kushner Resnick replaces statistics with detailed lives of some of the seventy-five men who died in the 1943 mine explosion in Bearcreek, Montana—an explosion that, for some families, still echoes today.”—Scott Martelle, author of Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West
