Reckoning at Eagle Creek
WINNER of the 2010 DAVID BROWER AWARD for ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING (Sierra Club)
WINNER of the DELTA AWARD for LITERATURE (Southern Illinois University)
"If you take away anything from the work of playwright, journalist, historian and activist Jeff Biggers, it should be this: There’s no such thing as clean coal."--Louisville LEO Weekly
“Part historical narrative, part family memoir, part pastoral paean, and part jeremiad against the abuse of the land and of the men who gave and continue to give their lives to (and often for) the mines, [Reckoning at Eagle Creek] puts a human face on the industry that supplies nearly half of America’s energy…it offers a rare historical perspective on the vital yet little considered industry, along with a devastating critique of the myth of ‘clean coal.’ ”—Publishers Weekly
Award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us on a journey into the secret history of coal mining in the American heartland. Set in the ruins of his family’s strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation’s dirty energy policy over the past two centuries. Reckoning at Eagle Creek digs deep into the tangled roots of the coal industry beginning with the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. It chronicles the removal of Native Americans, and the hidden story of legally sanctioned black slavery in the land of Lincoln. It uncovers a century of regulatory negligence, vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety, and the devastating environmental consequences of industrial strip-mining.
Reckoning at Eagle Creek is ultimately an exposé of “historicide,” one that traces coal’s harrowing legacy through the great American family saga of sacrifice and resiliency and the extraordinary process of recovering our nation’s memory. Coal will never be called clean or cheap again.
"...a tour de force."--Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
“Jeff Biggers exposes the truth about coal in America—how the myth of “clean coal” destroys even family histories. But Biggers is a long-time warrior in another fight—to stabilize climate and preserve a good life for young people. Let us hope his message about dirty coal is read far and wide.”—James Hansen, NASA Goddard Center, author of Storms of My Grandchildren
“As this fine book makes clear, coal has always and ever been a curse, poisoning everything and everyone it touches—right up to the climate on which we depend for our daily bread. What a story!” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
“[An] enriching history…An important look at the staggering human and environmental costs of mining.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Biggers is a cultural historian and it is the social strip-mining that angers him most. But seldom have the environmental and social landscapes been so well described in a single essay."--New Scientist
"Biggers, with his coal country background and authentic folk-hero style, joins a literary movement as well as a political one — the field of creative nonfiction. Like Robert Morgan in his biography “Boone,” he packs the panorama and lays claim to being transformational as well as authoritative."--Citizen Times, North Carolina
"A history that any student of coal's legacy should know."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Nobody writes about Appalachia like Jeff Biggers. His voice is a swirl of history and memory, of fact and analysis, of hillbilly wisdom and journalistic outrage. Reckoning at Eagle Creek is bigger and brawnier than a memoir or cultural chronicle—it’s a passionate howl from the dark heart of American coal country."—Jeff Goodell, author, Big Coal
"Biggers offers much that’s new, especially concerning events in the coalfields of southern Illinois, where his grandfather worked in the pits, where strip mining began, where Mother Jones organized workers, and where some of our nation’s fiercest labor battles were fought."--Scott Russell Sanders, Orion Magazine
"A lot of history is presented here in a personal style by a cultural historian with a keen eye. A valuable read for followers of environmental history."--Library Journal
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About Jeff Biggers
”Jeff Biggers has the keenest eye in the business, and he has a fine luminous voice to tell you what he has seen. Biggers manages to write like a poet, a historian, a naturalist and an adventurer.”—Luis Urrea, author of The Hummingbird's Daughter
Author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek, The United States of Appalachia and In the Sierra Madre, Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, educator, and radio correspondent across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico. He served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West. His award-winning stories have appeared on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon, among many others newspapers, magazines and online journals. He regularly blogs for the Huffington Post. Biggers is a frequent speaker and performer at theatres, festivals, conferences and schools. His play, "4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire," won the "Greener Planet Award" at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in New York City, and has appeared on Off Broadway and at theatres around the country.
His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, the Delta Award for Southern Illinois literature, a Field Foundation Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award/Fellowship. He serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center. In the 1990s, as part of his work to develop literacy and literary programs in rural communities in the American Southwest, he founded the Northern Arizona Book Festival. In the 1980s, Biggers served as an assistant to former Senator George McGovern in Washington, DC, and as a personal aide to Rev. William Sloane Coffin at the Riverside Church in New York City, where he co-founded the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing. Biggers also co-founded The Coal Free Future Project, a theatre arts group, dealing with coal, climate and clean energy themes.
Raised in Illinois and Arizona, he earned a B.A. in History and English at Hunter College in New York City. He also studied at the University of California in Berkeley, Columbia University and the University of Arizona. He presently divides his time between Tucson, Arizona and Illinois.
Other Books
The United States of Appalachia
Read an interview and excerpt on National Public Radio:
“Jeff Biggers’s inspiring book should be a best seller immediately. It is a ‘how-to’ book—how to assert your fundamental rights and how to speak out in the manner of t he American Revolution footsloggers, whose descendants they are. Read it and your faltering hopes will rise.” --Studs Terkel
Beyond its mythology in the American imagination, Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-—a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence, and a hot bed for literature and music. Some of the most quintessential and daring American innovations, rebellions, and social movements have emerged from an area often stereotyped as a quaint backwater. In the process, immigrants from the Appalachian diaspora have become some of our nation's most famous leaders.
"A masterpiece of popular history...revelations abound.”—Citizens-Times, North Carolina
"A rich narrative...a respectful ode.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Biggers' book educates us as to just how biased and ignorant we really are about this region and its rich legacy of cultural, political, and intellectual pioneers...full of historical insights.”—San Antonio Express-News
“Jeff Biggers opens a new window on the complex history of the region called Appalachia. He takes a hard but affectionate look at both the myths and the facts, and what he finds is by turns sobering and thrilling. Drawing on the contradictions, layers, and range of what is known as mountain culture, he shows that nothing is quite what it seems, and that to understand American history it is essential to know Appalachian history. Biggers tells his story with verve and vivid detail, a story that will at once provoke and inspire.”—Robert Morgan, author of Boone, Gap Creek
In Sierra Madre
Winner of the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award: Gold Medal
Published and translated in French by Albin Michel, Dans la Sierra Madre.
Read an excerpt in The Atlantic:
"An astonishing sojourn."–Booklist
"... numerous unforgettable characters, and situations that only a traveler of this ilk could manage. Biggers is the quintessential observer, with the eye and voice of a poet.”—San Antonio Express–News
The Sierra Madre--no other mountain range in the world possesses such a ring of intrigue. In the Sierra Madre is a groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir that chronicles the astonishing history of one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara in Mexico's Copper Canyon, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of the Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, hidden Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters like Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre (Mexico's Copper Canyon).
Read an excerpt at World Hum:
"Once every generation a book comes along that captures the stunning terrain and hidden life of Mexico's remote western Sierra Madre. In the Sierra Madre is that book for this generation. Jeff Biggers has seen the strange and remarkable that the rest of us can only imagine.” --Tom Miller, author of The Panama Hat Trail and On the Border
"A compassionate and engaging view not just of the Raramuri, but how they and their canyon home have been perceived, portrayed and affected by outsiders.”—Arizona Republic/Gannett News Service
No Lonesome Road
Winner of the American Book Award
“ A powerful and important book...West was...one of the 20th century’s most important American poets and activists.”—Silas House, Herald-Leader
“The brilliant trajectory of Don West’s career as a radical Southerner in the hard-scrabble decades of the 1930s and beyond still glows like the tail of a comet. He wrote sermons and poetry that crackled with vibrancy, exalting Jesus as the revolutionary savior of the downtrodden and exhorting the least of these to rise up and assert their God-given equality. No Lonesome Road rescues from obscurity much of Don West’s published writing, and his words still resonate with freshness and immediacy.”—John Egerton, author of Speak Now Against the Day
Co-edited by George Brosi and Jeff Biggers, No Lonesome Road is the landmark publication of the work of Appalachia’s legendary poet-activist Don West. A best-selling literary phenomenon, Appalachian historian, political militant and labor organizer, organic farmer and preacher, West is perhaps best known as the cofounder of the historic Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia.
Blogs, Stories, Radio Programs
A contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, Jeff Biggers' work has appeared in scores of American and foreign newspapers and magazines, and numerous anthologies, including Coal Country,and We All Live Downstream, among others. He also wrote the foreword to the 2011 re-issue of Huey Perry's classic, They'll Cut Off Your Project. Follow Jeff Biggers’ blogs on:
Speaker, Keynotes, Workshops
Jeff Biggers has given lectures, readings and performances at over 100 universities and colleges across the country, from the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Georgia in Athens to Yale University. He has delivered the keynote address at numerous educational, environmental and literary conferences, and has participated in book festivals in over 25 states. Jeff Biggers also leads workshops for students and writers on creative writing, narrative nonfiction, travel writing, environmental writing, clean energy and sustainable development, and art and activism.
He has also appeared on numerous TV and radio programs as a commentator and expert, including the Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC Ed Shultz Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN, Democracy Now, GRIT TV, Thomas Hartmann Show, National Public Radio, American Public Radio/Marketplace, among others.
To book Jeff as a speaker or to lead a workshop, contact: speakerjrbiggers at gmail.com
In Progress: State Out of the Union: Arizona
STATE OUT OF THE UNION: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream
forthcoming in September, 2012, Nation Books
Based on the frontlines of what Daily Show host Jon Stewart hailed the "meth lab of democracy," A STATE OUT OF THE UNION chronicles a David vs. Goliath story for modern times: After the signing of Arizona's saber-rattling SB 1070 "papers please" law erupts into a national brawl over immigration issues, a new generation of social media savvy young Latino activists and their moderate allies outraged by the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabby Giffords inspire a modern-day civil rights movement to reclaim the state, take down the self-proclaimed Tea Party President and SB 1070 architect in a historic recall election, and reframe the national debate over immigration and civil rights.
A STATE OUT OF THE UNION explores the state's century of conflict over labor and civil rights, and cyclical upheavals over immigration rights, dating back to the national battle over Arizona's groundbreaking constitution, which guaranteed the right to recall politicians. A STATE OUT OF THE UNION weaves Arizona's colliding cultural histories into a backdrop for a greater American story playing out in the nation's famed frontier state, from the heroic role of labor unions and Arizona native son Cesar Chavez to infamous rightwing politicians, carpetbaggers and frontier sheriffs who have shaped the nation's conservative agenda.
Nearly a century ago, Arizona’s first state governor, George W. Hunt, warned his fellow Arizonans that a national showdown was taking place in their state. “The working class, plus the professional class, represent 99 percent,” Hunt said. “The remaining 1 percent is represented by those who make a business of employing capital.” Made from a copper mining camp in rural Arizona, Hunt’s admonition still resonates on Wall Street today. As Hunt put it, “It will be a happy day for the nation when the corporations shall be excluded from political activity…and vast accumulations of capital cannot be employed in an attempt to control government.”
Long before Hunt and his labor shock troops ushered in one of the nation’s most progressive state constitutions in 1912, the clash over Arizona’s vast natural resources, its native and immigrant labor ranks, and its rooted inhabitants and carpet-bagging business interests had not only placed the state on the frontlines of American politics but also helped force our nation to come to grips with America’s fundamental commitment to civil rights and democracy.
Contact
For media and marketing inquiries on Reckoning at Eagle: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, please contact:
Cassie Dendurent Nelson
Assistant Director of Publicity
The Perseus Books Group
387 Park Ave. South
New York, NY 10016
Phone: 212-340-8132
email: cassie.nelson at perseusbooks.com
All other inquiries can be sent to:
Jeff Biggers
Email: contactbiggers at gmail.com
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