Reckoning at Eagle Creek
“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.
At the heart of our national debate over climate change and the crucial transition toward clean energy, is the Obama administration’s controversial pursuit of “clean coal.” Biggers exposes the fallacy that lies at the heart of this policy and shatters the Big Coal marketing myth that Illinois represents the “Saudi Arabia of coal.” 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.
“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
"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
"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
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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. A contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, he regularly blogs for the Huffington Post and Grist. A member of the multimedia theatre performance company, Coal Free Future Project , Biggers is also a playwright, whose "4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire" play has appeared on Off Broadway and at theatres around the country. Biggers is a frequent speaker and performer at festivals, conferences and educational institutions.
His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Plattner Award for Appalachian 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.
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 lives in 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
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. Follow Jeff Biggers’ blogs on:
Speaker, Keynotes, Workshops
Jeff Biggers has given lectures, readings and performances at over 60 universities and colleges across the country, from the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Georgia in Athens. 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, and art and activism.
To book Jeff as a speaker or to lead a workshop, contact: speakerjrbiggers at gmail.com
Coal Free Future Project
On the heels of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, Jeff Biggers is a co-founder of the Coal Free Future Project, a creative and artistic endeavor to inspire and galvanize an effective national climate justice movement in this historic moment to halt mountaintop removal mining and ultimately wean our country from fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy alternatives.
Incorporated as a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization, the Project is a unique collaboration of award-winning American artists—writers, actors/theatre director, filmmakers and musicians—who have come together to combine their long-time experiences in the clean energy, anti-strip-mining and mountaintop removal and climate justice movements to create performances and workshops that inform and inspire action around a simple but basic truth in our lives: It’s time to envision a coal free future and work toward clean energy independence.
In effort to draw attention to the national scandal of mountaintop removal mining, and the grave health impacts of coal mining and coal-fired plants, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate destabilization trigged by CO2 emissions, the Coal Free Future Project has launched a 20-state tour in 2010 with performances of "Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal," and “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire,” multimedia productions inspired by Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, and follow-up workshops with nonprofit citizen groups and environmental and student organizations on coal, mountaintop removal, climate change and clean energy options.
Theatrical productions have been performed across the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, Columbus, Louisville, Lexington, Asheville, universities including Yale University and Ohio University, and at the Gene Frankel Theatre in New York City.
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: jrbiggers at gmail.com
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