| THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal Peter A. Galuszka New York: St. Martin's Press, September 2012 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-250-00021-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-00021-1 | 283pp. | HC/BWI | $25.99 | |
| Page 2: | "For the coal industry, its list of dirty secrets prevails." |
| Wording: S/B "persists", or the sentence should include words that tell us what it prevails over. |
| Page 40: | "Don always tells you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not." |
| Attribution: I assume this was said by E. Morgan Massey, but the book doesn't explicitly say so. (Also, it's untrue.) |
| Page 43: | "By now, Blankenship was a major voice in West Virginia politics..." |
| Wording: I can't help but feel this S/B "vice". |
| Page 47: | "One humid spring evening, Garland is flipping burgers..." |
| Verb tense: The last sentence in this paragraph (next page) shifts to past tense. It's the first of several such shifts. |
| Page 62: | "...things haven't changed all that much since since firebrand Kentucky lawyer Harry M. Caudill revealed to the nation just how widespread and profound Appalachian poverty was with his 1962 book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and Lyndon B. Johnson tried to deploy the power of the federal government to eradicate it." |
| The poverty, not the book. |
| Page 75: | "...a sentiment that has been echoed for years and hasn't been true for almost as many." |
| Unspecific: How many years? |
| Page 86: | "The gorge at New River, the second oldest river in the world..." |
| Wording: I guess Old River1 is the very oldest. |
| Page 98: | "...which began a new round of acquisitions on other types of energy, such as coal, oil shale, and thermal energy." |
| Wording: probably S/B "geothermal energy". |
| Page 100: | "Royal Dutch Shell bankrolled security that included..." |
| Wording: It's unclear from previous descriptions why Royal Dutch Shell was involved here. |
| Page 106: | "Such stations are typically coal-, natural gas-, or nuclear-driven and can provide more megawatts than alternative forms, such as wind, solar, or hydroelectric energy, can supply." |
| Wording: This should make it clear that this means on a per-plant basis (although even that is shaky.) |
| Page 107: | "Obama concentrated instead on health care, although he did put $350 million or so into his first stimulus package to help back clean coal technologies and investigate alternative sources of energy, but the effort was for naught." |
| Says who? |
| Pages 108-9: | "Obama is an easy target for coal moguls, although he's a strange one since he really hasn't made much of a dent in any part of reinvigorated environmental protection..." |
| Again, says who? |
| Page 117: | "Yet the financial community, still traumatized after its own crisis in 2008..." |
| Says who... [click] Says who... [click] |
| Page 118: | "Coal can be pulverized to such a degree that the resulting powder burns very cleanly." |
| But no more cleanly wrt CO2, which is what this paragraph is about. |
| Page 124: | "Coupled with the carbon dioxide has come what many scientists say is unmistakable changes in weather patterns." |
| Number errors: S/B "have come"and "are". |
| Page 125: | "The idea is the antithesis of the concept of baseload generation, and Hawkins says it could be used in much the way the Internet is—millions of small generations." |
| Wording: S/B "small generators". |
| Page 127: | "Utility executives are increasingly choosing natural gas as the default fuel since there is no clear-burning coal." |
| Spelling: S/B "clean-burning". |
| Page 133: | "Oklahoma-born Haltom arrived in the Coal River Valley about ten years ago when his wife Sarah, and a native of the area, wanted to return home." |
| Extra word: S/B "a native of the area,". |
| Page 134: | "A company that she believed 'has the most unconscionable record in Appalachia.'" |
| Wording: This is not a sentence. |
| Page 138: | "...but even when earthmoving equipment such as bulldozers, earth scrapers, draglines, dump trucks and tanker vehicles were driven by combustion engines, they didn't see much use..." |
| With the highlighted words, it's a number error: they S/B removed. |
| Page 139: | "..but the independent operators really saw a way to make money, especially in parts of the mountains where coal seams had run their course with deep mining but where there were leftover parts of the seams near the surface, because those tab ends could easily and cheaply be exploited..." |
| Wording: S/B "those tag ends". |
| Page 141: | "Since the sulfur and other pollutants were toxic, and the shores of the ponds often were lined with the skeletons of dead animals that had used the ponds for drinking water." |
| Extra word: S/B "the shores of the ponds often were lined with the skeletons of dead animals". |
| Page 144: | "'I have never been in trouble,' [Ollie Combs] told me in 1997... [***] Combs, who died in 1991..." |
| These dates are mixed up — perhaps reversed. |
| Page 184: | "Nugent declared: [***] I like dead tyrants." |
| Nugent was the emcee of Blankenship's Labor Day 2009 event. But Ted, Blankenship is still alive! |
| Page 190: | "Yet Bobby Kennedy Jr. is as flawed as his namesake." |
| I'm sure the murdered Robert Kennedy had flaws, but flaws as grave as his son? |
| Page 212: | "In a 2007 [***] article Hadge Funds into the Boardroom, Loeb praises Inman..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Hedge Funds into the Boardroom". |
| Page 221: | "Blankenship immediately adopted an ultra defensive mode..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "ultra-defensive". |
| Page 226: | "Massey shareholders would get 1,025 Alpha shares plus ten dollars for each share held." |
| That would be one hell of a deal, but I'm sure the number should be "1.025". |
| Page 231: | "They include big mining firms such as Australia's Rio Tinto and America's Peabody Coal..." |
| Rio Tinto plc is headquartered in the UK where it was founded in 1873 to exploit the ancient copper mines on Spain's Río Tinto. And on page 221, we learn that the former Peabody Coal is now Patriot Coal. |
| Page 241: | "His flaws were easily exploited by foreign business interests that as now, had their eyes set on Mongolia's vast mineral wealth." |
| Missing comma: S/B "that, as now,". |
| Page 246: | "Mongolia's coal mines are in similar terrain..." |
| There's no indication of what terrain might be similar to the location of these mines. |
| Page 247: | "One problem with this theory is that if political relations between Beijing and Washington flare..." |
| Wording: S/B "political tensions". |
| Page 252: | "At that time, I noticed the new antennas..." |
| Verb tense: Here's another shift from the present tense of the preceding part of the paragraph. |
| Page 256: | "The rifle can hit targets two thousand yards away or nearly two miles." |
| Let's do the math. Two thousand yards is six thousand feet. There are 5,280 feet in a statute mile, so 2,000 yards is 1.14 miles. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.