The most recommended books about coal

This book is a history of the Battle of Britain, but one focusing more on the common folk and non-aviation personnel that held England together, upright, and unconquered during the German onslaught that followed the collapse of France. Meticulously researched, painstakingly analyzed, and somewhat shocking in its conclusions.

Lord, what an eye-opener! This book shows just how deep into totalitarianism a democracy can sink, just how fascistic a democracy can become overnight, and just how riven with class strife and unfair treatment the UK was throughout the battle.

Here are a few examples of the things that were happening during that time.

1) Given the shortage of coal miners and an unwillingness to pay the miners a fair wage, something on the order of twenty thousand young men were effectively enslaved, not conscripted to fight, but enslaved, to mine coal.

2) The British people were lied to consistently and continuously… show more.

Barak’s history of fossil fuels in the Middle East and the colonial extraction and incursion of British corporations throughout the region hugely clarifies the interdependence of imperialism and fossil fuels.

We’re shown how coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil causing recurring war, violence, exploitation, and more recently climate change. This powerful book thoroughly convinced me that the history of Empire is indelibly a history of carbonisation.

I was very young when I first read this book. Many years later I took it back from the shelf and went through its pages with older eyes.

The reality portrayed by Émile Zola in the 19th Century is quite brutal. The coal miners back then – with their struggle for life, excess work, permanent fatigue, lack of knowledge and understanding, contrasted by the careful calculations and comfort of their masters – mirror miners and other workers today.

Greed on one side, poverty on the other regarded as normal. The very few with enough wit to overthrow the injustice were silenced, as it happens today at the productive facilities of the capital.

Social unrest? No wonder.

Ah, Carver…where do I begin? This collection is packed with gems that, as Dylan sang, glow like burning coal. Carver’s poems make me want to drink too much, lament, get sober, and love so hard that my heart cracks open. These poems make me want to live a damn full life. Most of all, Carver makes me want to blow the shavings off my pencil and write.

This collection is a conversation with poetry and art itself; Carver invokes the pantheon from Balzac to Hemingway to Renoir. I want to join that conversation and write for dear life.

I started reading Annie Ernaux because of her recent Nobel Prize and because her translations (although I’m reading her in French) are published by a friend of mine at Seven Stories Press. 

This book is typical of her short novels (which would qualify as autofiction in current terminology) in circling a topic ever more tightly until it yields the essence of its meaning. Here the event is an (illegal) abortion she had in 1963; no detail is spared, however grisly, and yet the whole of the story has a transcendent quality (although reading it now has a particular resonance, with abortion now illegal in many of the (dis)United States). 

If a boa constrictor could squeeze diamonds into coal, it would feel something like reading Annie Ernaux.  

It's an awesome take on the old adage of how bad kids get coal for Christmas. One would have never thought, "Well, where does Santa get the coal?" Devivo's storyline takes you to the mines where the coal elves get it and the whole story behind how you get chosen.

This is a masterpiece and should be picked up as a movie to watch every Christmas season (come on Netflix, jump on it). Authors have to think outside the box, and she did this in glowing colors. Once you read the 1st book, you’ll have to finish the series.

Corless spent his life trawling through old magazines and scientific journals and recording articles about ancient artefacts that baffled the author at the time. He makes no comment on the articles, some of which reveal amazing discoveries. For example, the one about an iron cup that was found in a coal mine in Oklahoma. The coal had formed around it some 300m years ago and yet there it was—man-made but by whom. He outlines many other baffling discoveries as described in articles going back to the 19th century.

Reading Dos Passos’ account of his own travels across wartime America is a valuable corrective to the long-standing myth of a united home front, with civilians cheerfully sacrificing for the boys overseas. Instead, Dos Passos found rising rates of worker absenteeism in defense plants, management executives turning blind eyes to defects in airplanes in the name of profits, and lonely wives of defense workers living in makeshift housing going “trailerwacky” for lack of companionship. And when coal miners walked out on strike in 1943, imperiling war production, one miner explained to Dos Passos that “it’s the tough guys make themselves respected in this man’s country, the tough guys an’ the big winds.”

Billy Elliott is a miner’s son who wants to be a ballet dancer. This is an adaptation of Lee Hall’s original screenplay and, to me, lacks the feel of a novel, but I’ve chosen it for three reasons. It’s set in County Durham. It challenges traditional, macho values. It’s as good a description as anything I’ve read that describes aspects of the UK miners’ strikes of the 1980s. When Jackie, Billy’s dad, says, "There’s coal behind everything in this country. It’s still down there. We’re not,” you can sense the anger, hurt, and bitterness—and, forty years later, just like the coal, those feelings remain.

This was one of my favorite books as a child and probably one reason I became an anthropologist of mining.

Though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I found it fascinating that in a place where everything is doing the same job, especially a highly dangerous and damaging job, other aspects of culture coalesce around that job and its meanings—things like religion, kinship, gender, leisure, ecology, etcetera. I was deeply moved by the description of the vast slag heap that slowly came to tower over the town, eventually engulfing the narrator’s small house.