After the Fog

After the Fog by Kathleen Shoop

I purchased the ebook from Barnes & Noble.

My Review:

After the Fog takes place in Donora, PA, in the fall of 1948. Donora is a steel and zinc mill town about 40 miles south of Pittsburgh, and things are booming until an unusual weather pattern traps the town in a thick smog of dangerous pollution. Rose, the community nurse, has her hands full trying to treat patients while her home life is unraveling.

Shoop captures the region well. Residents of southwestern PA will love the references to Isaly's and cinderblock basement showers, pierogies, and other area quirks. The regional speech patterns also come through wonderfully (I've always maintained that "yunz" is a better rendering of our second-person plural than "yinz"). At times, however, the setting felt oddly distant. The events of the book took place only 65 years ago and many residents of the area would still be able to recall the period very well, but it seems that Shoop did most of her research in archives rather than interviews. That removal comes through in the writing.

My main beef with this book was that, not only did I dislike all of the characters except Leo, Father Tom, and the dog, I didn't care what happened to any of them. As Rose's family disintegrates more with every page, her actions and those of everyone else left me indifferent to the outcome. The characters, especially Rose, seem more like psychology textbook cases than living, breathing people. Other than the smog, the events and how the characters deal with them are so familiar as to be cliche. The fog itself serves only as a backdrop for the action in Rose's family, but I ceased early on to care about Rose's family.

I would recommend this book only if you have a strong interest in regional history and culture.

Stars: 2

This was a selection of my book club. I'm interested to find out what the other ladies thought of this one. I had a hard time wanting to pick it up to read and found myself frittering away time on the internet that I would normally spend reading. If it hadn't been for the regional aspect and the fact that I'll be discussing this soon, I'm not sure I would even have finished it.

Coal: A Human History

Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese

I downloaded the audiobook from the public library's OverDrive service.

My review:

This book attracted me because I grew up and still live in coal country. My parents worked at a coal mine on their college breaks (Mom in the office and surveying departments; Dad was down in the mines), my grandfather had a coal furnace in the basement, and strip mines are a significant feature of the landscape in certain areas. So, bias alert: I'm a friend of coal.

Barbara Freese presents an engaging look at the social and economic impact of coal throughout the thousands of years that humanity has been using it. Coal has often been closely linked to extremes of our human experience-- to brutal exploitation, danger, and suffering, as well as to staggering achievement and progress. While it definitely has an Anglo-Saxon focus, it does eventually get around to China and mentions (in passing) the coal resources of Europe.

So the social history interested me and I felt that those passages of the book were well-done. That heart of the book was unfortunately sandwiched between Freese's political agenda. She makes no secret from the very beginning of the fact that she is an environmental attorney. I do think that she tries to be unbiased in the historical sections of the book, and she does a decent job of that there.

But... (like I said, I have my own bias here!):

Freese spends a lot of time speculating about the vast death toll, innumerable illnesses, and untold environmental impact. She was fond of pulling out terrifying figures and catastrophic statistics, but they were usually preceded by phrases like "some suggest..." "it may even..." or "perhaps as high as..." She paints an extreme picture, but a close reading/listening reveals that the scientific data is not really conclusive on any of those factors. Her take on the situation is one take among the many, many possibilities left open by the available data.

Similarly, at the close of the book she sketches for us a new glory age of hydrogen energy, which will have been ushered in by a transitional era of reliance on natural gas in lieu of coal. Aside from the fact that I don't think this could be as great or attainable solution as she makes it out to be, Freese wants to achieve this through increasing environmental restrictions with the stated purpose of running the coal operations out of business. She grudgingly admits that this will be hard on the miners who lose their livelihoods, but hastens to add that the number of lives saved through lower pollution will outweigh that cost many times over. First, nobody even knows how many deaths have even actually been caused by coal, so it's equally impossible to know how many lives will be saved. Second, she's quick to select the sacrificial lambs that she thinks deserve to bear the burdens of the transition away from coal power. The entities to make the sacrifices are the already-developed nations-- specifically the United States, with the regions that depend largely or in whole on coal paying the bulk of the cost. We are supposed to take the hit so that developing nations can continue to pollute as we did in the past.

Just read Atlas Shrugged for an approximate idea of what I think of that.

Anyway... rant over.

Stars: 2.5

Runability: 2.5

The Johnstown Flood

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

I borrowed this WMA audiobook through the public library's OverDrive download service.

My review, originally shared April 2, 2012:

While the beginning of the book dragged a bit, as McCullough was introducing the setting and major players before the flood, I still enjoyed this book a lot and learned a great deal about the 1889 flood (Note: This book does not cover the flood in the 1970's and in fact doesn't mention it at all). As someone who grew up in southwest/central PA, I was familiar with most of the places that came up in the telling and found this book especially interesting from the regional standpoint. The stories of the survivors and especially of the relief efforts made me tear up more than once.

Edward Herrmann does a fantastic job reading the audio version. 

Stars: 4

Runability: 3 

Edward Herrmann is one of my favorite audiobook readers. Fans of the Gilmore Girls TV show will know him as Grandpa Gilmore. I kind of felt like Rory, hanging out with him in his study and talking books. I was glad that I made the choice to listen to this book on audio instead of "actually" reading it. 

I find that nonfiction books in general are more difficult for me to run to, perhaps because there's not usually as strong of a narrative thread holding it together in my brain. There were lots of mini-narratives throughout, but the overarching story was more difficult for me to follow and care about while huffing and puffing along the pavement.