The Mill

Rating:
Summary: Regional work
Review: An impressive collection of oral histories from people that worked all aspects of a stell mill. The book is smartly divided into chapters where each chapter represents a section of the steel mill operations: "blast furnace, clerical, management, union, electrical, railroad" etc, and one person is represented for each of these chapters to tell the story of his specific duties and life. It includes pictures, diagrams, and charts. After reading the oral histories, one can follow somewhat their histories by reading the layout plans and the diagrams. All these people are now old, and soon gone. Only their stories will be left. The epilogue of the book is a silent display of black and white pictures of Aliquippa today: boarded up stores, abbandoned buildings and streets, images that constrast sharply with the other photographs in the book of joyful parades and crowded streets. Amazing how a boom town was created in response to a momentary economic force such as steel industry, and now is semi-state of abbandon. Sounds almost like a science fiction movie, of lost worlds of thriving communities, but that this book brings back to life.

Rating:
Summary: a lost world comes to life
Review: An impressive collection of oral histories from people that worked all aspects of a stell mill. The book is smartly divided into chapters where each chapter represents a section of the steel mill operations: "blast furnace, clerical, management, union, electrical, railroad" etc, and one person is represented for each of these chapters to tell the story of his specific duties and life. It includes pictures, diagrams, and charts. After reading the oral histories, one can follow somewhat their histories by reading the layout plans and the diagrams. All these people are now old, and soon gone. Only their stories will be left. The epilogue of the book is a silent display of black and white pictures of Aliquippa today: boarded up stores, abbandoned buildings and streets, images that constrast sharply with the other photographs in the book of joyful parades and crowded streets. Amazing how a boom town was created in response to a momentary economic force such as steel industry, and now is semi-state of abbandon. Sounds almost like a science fiction movie, of lost worlds of thriving communities, but that this book brings back to life.

Rating:
Summary: Regional work
Review: It appears that the work-The Mill utilized the vernacular of the region so that the oral histories were preserved as they were; not as an "edited" version resulting in a loss of cultural diversity and a less interesting tapestry portraying the Western Pennsylvania region.

Rating:
Summary: good concept, bad execution
Review: The book's concept is good, a collection of oral histories of workers from Jones & Laughlin in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. However, the editing is absolutely atrocious. Typos and spelling errors abound, and at no point does the author offer to explain anything the workers are talking about. If you're knowledgeable about the steelmaking process, you will understand some of the things they say, but the author could have put in footnotes to clarify some of their points or make some things more understandable. The editing of this book greatly detracts from the overall work, and after a while, becomes outright frustrating. That's too bad; these workers lived hard lives, and they clearly have something to say. Too bad the author and publisher couldn't help them with that.