Winds of Change Newsletter, February 2006     See sidebar for table of contents

Book on MTR's Horrors Reviewed

Lost Mountain, by Erik Reece

Excerpt from a book review on MonstersandCritics.com: A portrait of coal country as stark and galvanizing as Harry Caudills classic Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962).

In the old days of contour mining, excavations were carried out along ridgelines. Now the name of the game is mountaintop removal: Blast the high ground to smithereens, scavenge the detritus and plow the waste into the valley below, like so much toxic dust swept under the rug. Reece chronicles these ecological scalpings in anxious chapters written with an eye for abiding, catastrophic imagery. He does not lack material. Once a superb mesophytic forest habitat with an abundant diversity of species, the region now resembles the buttes of the American West.