It's as hard to see through the title of this book as it is to find your way around in an unlit coal mine.

I was attracted to the book because I'm interested in the folk songs of the Pennsylvania coal fields (where the folklorist George Korson found quite a bit of interesting material), and this book obviously sounds like it's a history of those fields -- and it quotes the most famous of all coal mining songs, J. B. Geoghegan's "Down in the coal mine":
Down in the coal mine, underneath the ground,
Where a gleam of sunshine never can be found,
Digging up the dusky diamonds all the seasons 'round,
Deep down in the coal mine, underneath the ground.

The book even quotes that song in its epigraph, but it doesn't so much as note the fact that it's by J. B. Geoghegan.

And it gets worse once you get into the book. It is not, as it claims, a history of the Pennsylvania coal region. First, it's not a history; it's a collection of anecdotes. There's nothing really wrong with that as long as it's clearly so labelled -- but it is false advertising, or at least false title-writing. Second, it's not about the Pennsylvania coal region as a whole; it's about the town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Oh, Shamokin isn't an asteroid in an orbit entirely separate from the rest of the coal country, so you will occasionally find out a little about some other place. But it's really all Shamokin all the time. Even the most notorious events in the history of the coal country -- the Long Strike and Molly Maguire trials of the 1870s -- barely show up; there are a few pages on the Long Strike, but the Mollies go by the boards, since their actions and their court cases did not take place in Shamokin.

And if by some chance you want to look up something in particular, about some other place or even about Shamokin, you can't, because there is no index and there isn't even a table of contents. This is more of a scrapbook than a serious work of history.

On the positive side, the book deserves at least some praise for being willing to face the dirty, deadly side of mining. And it's nice that the town of Shamokin has its little book of history. I wish more places had them. But it should be mandatory that the title say that that's what the book is, and not pretend to be something it is not. And I hope that most towns, when they get their book, get something a little more coherent than this. This looks like a mine pit after the coal cart slipped off the tracks and spilled its contents. ( )

This is different than most coal region history books. Instead of the usual chronological story of the mines, this one starts with the first settlers in Shamokin and takes you to about 1910. Then it gives you tons of anecdotal stories about what life was like around that time. It's fascinating. ( )