Coal Black Heart: The story of coal and the lives it ruled
The global saga of coal told through John’s ancestors. Buy it now!
Praise for Coal Black Heart:
“John DeMont’s book is so full of his exuberance about the history of coal mining in Nova Scotia that it practically bounces off the table. DeMont’s exuberance comes naturally–he had relatives who worked in the mines, but when the 1992 Westray mine disaster came along, it rekindled his interest in them. “I had never laid eyes on a single miner who worked the Pictou County coal seams. . . . I’d managed to forget that generations of my ancestors had taken the long ride underground to hack out the black stone that has transformed societies and launched empires,” DeMont writes.
It’s a good thing he remembered or Canadians might not have been graced with this wonderful book…This style of lively, personable prose fairly carries the narrative along, just the way a tram loaded with coal might slip along a track in a Cape Breton mine… DeMont is no ordinary journalist. The heartbeat of Nova Scotia’s mining story is beautifully captured here and thanks to DeMont’s considerable talent, it will never die.”
– Calgary Herald
“elegiac, scrupulously researched but often shocking…
There is coal dust in John DeMont’s own genes –a heritage stemming from both sides of his family and going back two centuries to Britain’s industrial revolution…Which is why Coal Black Heart often reads like a personal history — despite the fact that DeMont’s coal saga extends 300 million years into the past, ponders the early explorations of men like Samuel de Champlain and John Cabot, casts light on the unexpected role played by King George III in the development of a Nova Scotia coal industry, examines a 19th-century coal culture where “the rich built palaces and the poor went shoeless,” and is as much an economic chronicle as a social one in examining the late 20th-century collapse of the province’s coal and steel industries and what the miners still see as an act of betrayal by the federal government.
…Coal Black Heart abounds in vivid prose snapshots of the way things were: the “perpetual servitude” imposed on the mining community by the company store; Glace Bay’s infant mortality rate of 306 per 1,000 babies at a time when the national average was 88; the terrors that haunted Joe MacDonald, a miner who slept with a nightlight for the rest of his life after being trapped underground in a mine disaster; the ghastly plight of the ponies that worked in the mines: if they didn’t catch lockjaw, they frequently broke their legs when dragging the coal boxes and had to be put down.
But DeMont also sees something mythological in his saga.
“There are archetypal figures in there — the twirling-moustache villainy of some of the mine owners, but also the swashbuckling elements you find in the promoters and people willing to gamble in the industry.”
And on the other side, there are the miners.
“There is the awfulness of the lives — I was certainly drawn to tell that side of the story — but there was also the stoicism. The heroism on some level has always drawn me to the story. I defy anyone not to see poetry in these lives.
“God knows, life was hard, but there was also this immense endurance, and epic ability to put one foot down in front of the other and kind of soldier on.”
– Ottawa Citizen
” ..a sprawling and delightful ode to coal and the men — not a metrosexual keyboard jockey among them — who transcend “the deeps” in order to dredge up Earth’s filthy black detritus… Mr. DeMont’s book is lovingly written — part economics lesson, part geography primer, part memoir — and is refreshingly leavened with flashes of lightness amid the blackened faces….Bravo to Mr. DeMont for saving the dreams, the tragedies, the memories and the quiet courage of the men and boys of Cape Breton’s coal mines for posterity,”
– The National Post
““A prodigious book, a compelling gathering of anecdote and data, written skillfully and often lyrically,”
—Globe and Mail
“Finally a book about…when coal was king,”
—Maclean’s Magazine
“An entertaining and informative work of…history with truly global implications,”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“A captivating work of social history… DeMont excels in capturing the stories of each generation of Nova Scotian coal miners,”
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
“There is history big and small here, heroism and heartbreak and humanity in all its diversity. Coal Black Heart is an epic tale and a compelling one—John DeMont’s prose grabs you by the shirt collar and keeps you turning the pages.”
—D’Arcy Jenish, author of Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Opening of the West.
“The way things are going these days, the market for books about declining industries may soon be a robust one. But before anyone drafts a pitch for a book on Southern Ontario’s vanishing automobile sector, they should read John DeMont’s Coal Black Heart as an exemplar.”
—Quill and Quire, March, 2009
“John DeMont has written a fascinating global history of a material that has ruled this part of the country for many years and ruined countless lives…..Coal Black Heart delivers the goods on some of the most awful chapters in company-employee relations. If nothing else, get this book to read the chapter on the events leading up to the shooting of William Davis, whose death is remembered each year in Nova Scotia on June eleventh….Coal Black Heart should maintain his (DeMont’s) reputation as a best-selling, award-winning writer who’s not afraid to open the door on those long-forgotten skeletons in Atlantic Canada’s business and political closets.
—Atlantic Books Today, Spring, 2009
“For more than two centuries, much of Canada’s wealth has come from beneath our feet, and John DeMont’s Coal Black Heart reveals one of the dirtiest, darkest and earliest installments of our national story. In a moving work of memoir, archival research and fireside storytelling, he traces the feast-or-famine history of Nova Scotia’s coal industry through the eyes of his own rough-hewn ancestors - from the dawn of the Coal Age, when the cliffs of Cape Breton were literally black with promise, to the spate of mine closures in recent years.
“The book re-creates the triumphs, struggles and eventual devastation of one of this country’s most revered cultural motifs: the maritime coal miner. But DeMont, a Halifax-based author and journalist, chafes at modern depictions of miners as “quaint, kinda sad relics of our industrial past” or those ”lazy parasites” continually on strike. In seeking to redefine them as “real men doing hellishly dangerous jobs that would leave the rest of us … curled up in the corner bawling for Mama,” he succeeds tremendously. DeMont affords miners a melancholic dignity that kept me turning the pages, if only to find out just how bad things really got.
“Regular explosions, cave-ins and all manner of grief haunted the boom towns that popped up across Nova Scotia in the early 1800s as huge amounts of capital arrived from a newly industrialized and coal-hungry England. Youngsters who couldn’t walk past a cemetery without catching fright were deemed old enough to work (and suffer) underground. Corporations got away with scandalous abuse, politicians greased the rails, and labour unions began their precipitous rise.
“But while successive generations of young men disappeared into the mines, a country was taking shape at the surface. Those rugged small towns became some of Canada’s first experiments in multi culturalism, drawing migrants not only from England and Scotland but also from countries such as Belgium, Russia and Spain. And, as DeMont writes, those coal miners became “the stuff of legend in a young place searching for its own unifying stories.”
– Canadian Geographic