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Black Diamonds

A Childhood Colored by Coal

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A lyrical literary memoir of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Black Diamonds uncovers layers of history about the place that fueled the nation for over a century. As a girl in the 1960s, Catherine Young lived amid mountains of waste coal above ground and mine fires beneath her feet while longing for the green, lovely scene portrayed in The Lackawanna Valley, George Inness's 1855 painting. She shows readers the valley through a child's eyes, passing through the immigrant kitchens, relief lines, and soot-stained alleys of a collapsing city—and family love amid lives cut short by coal.
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    • Booklist

      September 1, 2023
      Young looks back to her childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which had been the nation's coal capital, but by the 1960s its golden age of industry was over. Young contrasts her experiences in the Lackawanna Valley, a once prosperous mining community turned grim and polluted by coal mining and coal waste, with the 1856 landscape painting, The Lackawanna Valley, by George Inness, a pastoral view of the verdant valley even as plumes rise from a passing train and industrial sites on the horizon. Young writes about the valley with both deep affection and sharp clarity. She recalls loving the vegetable gardens her grandfather kept and observing how hard the women in the family worked canning the harvest to save money on food. Young also writes about how living in the coal-dimmed valley distorted her sense of color; she didn't know that her beloved stuffed bunny was white and not gray until she washed the dust away. Young's memoir of her hometown is as powerful a picture as Inness' painting, revealing its harsh transformation a century later.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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