Synopsis:
The deepest coal mine in North America was notoriously unpredictable. One late October evening in 1958, it "bumped" - its rock floors heaving up and smashing into rock ceilings. A few miners staggered out, most of the 174 on shift did not.
Nineteen men were trapped, plunged into darkness, hunger, thirst, and hallucination. As days and nights passed, the survivors began to hope for death by gas rather than from thirst. Above ground, journalists and families stood in despairing vigil, as rescuers brought out scores of the dead. The hope of finding life undergound faded and families made funeral preparations.
Then, a miracle: Rescuers stumbled across a broken pipe leading to a cave of survivors, then a second group was discovered.
A media circus followed. Ed Sullivan, then the state of Georgia, invited survivors to visit. Publicity, politics, and segregation sorted the men differently than they had ordered themselves. Underground, the one black survivor nursed a dying man; in Atlanta, Governor Marvin Griffin said: "I will not shake hands with a Negro."
If every great writer has one tale of peril, heroism, and survival, Last Man Out is Melissa Fay Greene's. Using long-lost stories and interviews with survivors, Greene has reconstructed the drama of their struggle to stay alive
Review:
It's hard to imagine a scenario more terrifying than being trapped in a gaseous, crumbling coal mine two miles beneath the earth's surface in utter darkness, without food or water, while your gravely injured colleagues howl in agony all around you. This is the premise of author Melissa Fay Greene's engrossing book, Last Man Out, which recreates the Springhill, Nova Scotia mine disaster of 1958. Of the 174 men who entered the mine on the afternoon shift of October 23, 74 never left. Last Man Out is the story of two small groups among the 99 survivors who lasted more than a week in the bowels of the deepest coal mine in the world after its sudden collapse. By relying (among other things) on survivor interviews conducted at the time by two Nova Scotia professors, Greene places the reader in the devastated shafts with the men. "Deep underground, darkness and silence ruled for an unknown length of time," writes the author, "The narrow layers of air swarmed with coal dust as if the flying particles and specks of coal were the only things in the universe, like black, charred, stirred-up matter in the eons before Creation. In the swirling blackness, the men's faces stung as if in a sandstorm. Some unconscious, some dying, they were zinged and pelted where they lay by a thousand small meteorites of coal." We hear their conversations--all lyrical Maritimer lilt--and watch as they struggle to free those trapped, and to free themselves. Greene also gives us their families, working class folks just barely hanging on and facing utter ruin at the loss of the sole breadwinner. And we hear from many of the 137 reporters from around the world--plus accidental participants such as comedian Shecky Green--who gather at the site to bring the tragic story home. Greene is successful not only in capturing the misery of the trapped men but also in giving context to the horrifying event. Educated men don't descend the mines to make a living; men with no alternatives do. Their strength and dignity in the face day-to-day adversity makes Last Man Out a thoroughly humbling read. --Kim Hughes, Amazon.ca
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