Last Man Out

Rating:
Summary: Great Story, Distracting Technique
Review: Author Melissa Fay Greene employes the "non-fiction novel" storytelling technique in the book, "Last Man Out," which in a disaster book always carries the risk of exploiting the agony of the victims for the sake of sensationalism. Greene's use of generalizations to describe what certain individuals were thinking as well as her occasionally overdramatic literary prose mar what is otherwise a very compelling real life story.

The disaster itself hardly needs embellishment. Nineteen coal miners were trapped for days a mile underground when a large section of the Springhill mine in Nova Scotia collapsed in 1958. As the town above fretted and began to give up hope, the men lay entombed, slowly dying. This story is similar to one published last year by Karen Tintori in a book called "Trapped" about the 1909 Cherry Mine fire in Illinois. Tintori's book, however, relies on straight reporting and is thus far superior to this one.

The technique used by Greene is distracting and fails to place the disaster in proper context. The book is interesting primarily because the story is so compelling and because Greene is a very talented writer. When writing about disasters, however, the author has a duty to stay out of the way and let the victims tell their stories. By that measure, "Last Man Out" is a failure.

Rating:
Summary: A Superbly Written and Thoughtful Book
Review: Hemingway said the things that you want are like cards. You don't want a particular card, say the ten of hearts, unless it has some extrinsic significance other than itself. It could be a trump card. It could be the last card in your straight flush. It could be your margin of victory if you double-down on eleven, or the last thing you want to see if you have sixteen and the dealer's showing nineteen and you go bust. The intrinsic value of the little piece of pasteboard, in and of itself, is nothing and, sooner or later, it just gets shuffled back into the deck anyway.

But sometimes the things you want aren't like cards; sometimes you want them just because you want the things themselves, because you need them, because you literally can't do without them. Sometimes the things you want are like a few drops of water, coursing down a filthy pipe. Sometimes the things you want are to hear the far-off sounds of people digging, coming to rescue you. Sometimes the things you want are little pieces of sunlight, or one more memory of a hunting trip, or to know that your husband is alive, underground, and that he is making his way out of the very pit of death. Sometimes the things that you want matter more than any card ever could.

LAST MAN OUT: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster is about those latter things --- how we want them and why. It provides an hour-by-hour narrative of two groups of miners stranded deep underground after a 1958 disaster in a Nova Scotia coal mine. Somewhere deep in the dark of the mines, there came a "bump" --- a small earthquake, perhaps, or the eruption of a long-forgotten seam of coal gas. The men of the afternoon shift of Mine #2 were hard at work when it came, digging coal from the earth, wanting the things that they wanted --- a fishing weekend on the Bay of Fundy, new furniture for the living room, shoes for the kids --- when the floor sprang from beneath their feet and smashed them into the ceiling, killing many, and leaving two groups of survivors trapped below.

Author Melissa Fay Greene calls them the "Group of Seven" and the "Group of Twelve" --- good, honest, working men caught under the crust of the earth like flies in amber. She skillfully combines interviews from the remaining survivors with research files from historical sources --- psychological studies on underground survival --- providing the reader with a rare glimpse of what goes on in men's minds in utter darkness and total devastation. She details the struggles of the Group of Twelve with coal gas and exhaustion, and the anguish of the Group of Seven in dealing with the injury of one of their number: a man with an arm trapped between two timbers that are also holding up the ceiling. Greene's narrative is harrowing and unsparing, putting the reader right down in the darkest recesses of the mine, feeling the torment and pain along with the luckless miners.

But the story takes place above ground and people are still looking for the things that they want there. The reporters want a good story and, in the infancy of television, they want electricity and network connections and people to interview and places to work. The rescuers want to keep working, but they also want hope. How can there be any hope with so many men dead and so little chance of rescuing those left alive? And then there are the people on the farthest edges who want other things --- not to have Ed Sullivan mad at them or to improve the tourist traffic in coastal Georgia --- that intersect with the story of the trapped miners in unpredictable ways.

Greene's book is outstanding, not just as an analysis of the men in the mine, but as a microcosm, a laboratory slide, of North America in the last sliver of the 1950's, and how the coming of the television age and the first rumblings of the civil rights movement were affecting and changing the cultural landscape. LAST MAN OUT is a comprehensive look at a single traumatic instant and a study of how that instant reverberated through society. If you're looking for a superbly written, thoughtful book, then this is what you want.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

Rating:
Summary: BRINGS YOU TO TEARS
Review: In the year 1958, the Springhill Mine Disaster occurred in Nova Scotia, where men were trapped and plunged into darkness below sea level with little hope of escape or ever seeing their families again.

As you reach further into the book you become distraught and filled with anxiety one time and then hope at another interval.. For from day to day the picture changed and one was never sure how the trapped miners were going to have the strength to persevere.

They were challenged beyond what I thought humankind could endure, and then again it is at those weakest moments when we do find that strength, and do the impossible.......like jumping fences too high for us........cutting off our legs if they hurt too badly, those kind of things.

This book is true story and not to be taken for lightly or for granted. I would give this book five golden stars......and then Ms. Melissa Fay Greene for her wonderful courage in writing this great book.

Heather (nettle-girl)

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully written and compelling story
Review: Last Man Out is an engaging and compelling story about the Springhill mine disaster, in which 75 miners perished. Miraculously, two groups of trapped miners survived underground for almost a week before being rescued. The book reads like a novel - Green skillfully weaves together information from a variety of sources, including detailed interviews conducted by researchers soon after the event and her own interviews with the now elderly survivors or their families. The book provides a multi-dimensional picture behind the seemingly simple events; in her narrative, disaster can pull people away from each other as much as it binds them together. A good read and a fascinating study of the first disaster story handled by the new medium of television. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: An incredible book that must be read by everyone ever!
Review: Last Man Out is quite possibly the greatest work of nonfiction I have ever read. The writer wonderfully captures the terror of being trapped in pitch blackness for seven and a half days. The countless details of the survival attaches the reader to each of the trapped men. Because of this attachment, the reader is then appalled at the treatment received by the miners after their rescue.

This is a fantastic, awesome, excellent, outstanding, wonderful, terrific, splendid, fabulous, marvelous, magnificent, first-rate, brilliant, tremendous (and any other possible synonym of fantastic) book that should be purchased immediately.

Rating:
Summary: A whole lot more that a survival story!
Review: The basic facts of this book's content - the event surrounding the Spring Hill Mine rescue have been covered in other reviews and I will not waste time rehashing them yet again. Instead I would like to focus upon the less obvious gems within this book that in my opinion transend the amzing story of survival.

Melissa Green takes the reader on a journey not just into a coal mine, but into life in this working class town in 1958. The families, the marriages and the race relations all form a familiar image for those who like myself lived in or near the same time frame(in my case as a child) except that this book provided me an understanding of my parent's world. While my father wasn't a miner or ever a manual laborer nevertheless the men of the mine matched up with faces and families of those I grew up with in a world long lost to history. Of solid men who took care of their families, saved, and yet know how to have fun.

Beyond that personal appeal the medium of the story takes us with the trapped men and allows us to expereince their empotions. Somehow inspite of the fact we know it is coming the disaster seems as fresh and unexpected as it was to the men who also knew that some day there would be the "big one" and prayed they wouldn't be inside when it happened.

The aftermath leaves the reader choking on coal dust and shaken by the sight of crushed men whom they have just gotten to know. Unlike some writers the author doesn't pretty it up and the all the horror and mental trauma of the men is ours to share. We also share through the men's thoughts, thoughts of children and the future they now realize they will never see, thoughts of wives whom they will never hold and the constant and never ending question of what will it be like when death comes? Like so many of us who take life's little pleasures for granted, this disaster brings into focus for these trapped and dying men the value of those things and people they took for granted.

Lie in the coal black mine on a bed of broken rock while thirst unlike anything you have ever known treatens to drive you out of your mind. Realize your pants can't stay up because you've lost so much weight and understand that you can't last, can't live much longer. Then return to thoughts of your parched throat that feels as if it is filled with a splintery wooden stake that keeps "being twisted and twisted."

A harrowing and personal experience. Well done! Well done indeed!

Rating:
Summary: A whole lot more that a survival story!
Review: The basic facts of this book's content - the event surrounding the Spring Hill Mine rescue that I will not waste time rehashing them yet again. Instead I would like to focus upon the less obvious gems within this book that in my opinion transend the amzing story of survival.

Melissa Green takes the reader on a journey not just into a coal mine, but into life in this working class town in 1958. The families, the marriages and the race relations all form a familiar image for those who like myself lived in or near the same time frame(in my case as a child) except that this book provided me an understanding of my parent's world. While my father wasn't a miner or ever a manual laborer nevertheless the men of the mine matched up with faces and families of those I grew up with in a world long lost to history. Of solid men who took care of their families, saved, and yet know how to have fun.

Beyond that personal appeal the medium of the story takes us with the trapped men and allows us to expereince their empotions. Somehow inspite of the fact we know it is coming the disaster seems as fresh and unexpected as it was to the men who also knew that some day there would be the "big one" and prayed they wouldn't be inside when it happened.

The aftermath leaves the reader choking on coal dust and shaken by the sight of crushed men whom they have just gotten to know. Unlike some writers the author doesn't pretty it up and the all the horror and mental trauma of the men is ours to share. We also share through the men's thoughts, thoughts of children and the future they now realize they will never see, thoughts of wives whom they will never hold and the constant and never ending question of what will it be like when death comes? Like so many of us who take life's little pleasures for granted, this disaster brings into focus for these trapped and dying men the value of those things and people they took for granted.

Lie in the coal black mine on a bed of broken rock while thirst unlike anything you have ever known treatens to drive you out of your mind. Realize your pants can't stay up because you've lost so much weight and understand that you can't last, can't live much longer. Then return to thoughts of your parched throat that feels as if it is filled with a splintery wooden stake that keeps "being twisted and twisted."

A harrowing and personal experience. Well done! Well done indeed!

Rating:
Summary: The book that made me cry, laugh and think
Review: The book of Melissa Fay Greene is a wonderfully written, thoughtful description and analysis of an extreme situation: a disaster that strikes an entire town. What I love about the book is that it presents very difficult situations in a compassionate, yet totally true and honest way. The book is based on extensive research and interviews, and the author allows the men who were trapped underground in the mine collapse to speak with their own words, making their suffering and lives very distinct and understandable. Yet the voice of the author is also clearly heard in the book and she draws conclusions from these individual stories, conclusions about the nature of heroism, communal reactions to catastrophes, the solitude of dying. These conclusions are never ponderous: Melissa Fay Greene never preaches or behaves like "senior analysts" we are besieged with. Her reasoning is woven into the story, and she is a superb story-teller. She writes with such a talent and taste for language and words, that every page is a delight to read. This is a book that made me cry, laugh, and think. I recommend it to all readers.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed - written as "soap opera non-fiction"
Review: There seems to be a new writing style out there that is a cross between fiction and non-fiction (not faction), so let's call this style "soap opera non-fiction". That's where an author takes a historical event, and trys to write it like a "soap opera". The last two books I've bought have done this. I guess the object is to make the book appealling to more readers and therefore make more money.

This was a fascinating story that could have been better told if it was written from a documentary or historical perspective. I wanted to learn something, not read a made-for-TV movie.

I still don't know how the Governor of Georgia and his exploits fits in this story? That is a bizzare and dis-jointed side-story. She somehow tried to tie-in perceived racial incidents surrounding this tradgedy.

I was dissappointed in this book.

Rating:
Summary: My Book Club Will Love This
Review: These are the times that try men's souls--and men and women alike look to literature to buoy us up for the dark days that seem to keep coming. Thus, overturned cruise ships and volcanoes abound, but for my money you can do no better than pick up Last Man Out; The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Melissa Fay Greene has written more than a gripping hour-by-hour account of how, in 1958, 19 Canadian miners struggled to survive after a "bump" smashed floor and ceiling together, rendering the mine an underground prison. She takes a story that we think we've all seen before---the desparate, waiting women and children, the little town banding together, the media carnival that follows their miraculous rescue--and with nuanced language and a gift
for uncovering human folly, steers us to look beyond the tale
of disaster into its implications in the larger world. With Greene's book, we think not just about terror and bravery but what happens to heroes once the cameras finally turn off. Who is this book for? Well, definitely my book club, and Father's Day,
but now I'm thinking Mother's Day as well. It's that universally appealing, that compelling a read, that good.