The native Nova Scotian was drawn to the subject of his book by the Westray mine disaster in 1992, and he goes into considerable detail in his prologue to the book on the whys and wherefores. Although living in Halifax, in a province known for its coal, he had been quite unaware that people still went underground to dig for coal not so very far from him. "I felt both stupid and craven," he writes. "And an obsession was born."

In Chapter one he shows us coal through the eyes of a geologist. He makes us familiar with the Joggins cliffs in Chignecto Bay, Nova Scotia, which in geologist John Calder's mind is the "coal-age Galapagos." Here the history of coal is made visual through fossilized tree trunks hundreds of thousands of years old embedded in the cliffs. But DeMont goes much beyond the geological story of coal. He touches on Abraham Gessner, whom most of us know as the inventor of kerosine, and introduces us to other famous figures of the early 19^th century, who were fascinated by the origins of coal. Once the science of geology took root in the 19^th century, it began to support the theories of Darwin, thereby helping to usher in a new age of enlightenment.

I found it of great interest to learn that coal as a fuel is fairly recent in our history. Underground mining for this mineral did not begin until the industrial age required fuel to develop it. Without coal, it could not have happened. That is why the gems DeMont reveals to us are so important.

How coal was dug out of the ground, and is still dug out in places such a China and Russia, under the most appalling circumstances seems almost unbelievable. But, for many years in Britain, Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia and in the Ruhr Valley of Germany, coal mines employed not only men, but also women and children as young as four years old. How they did their work I leave to the reader to find out. It's not a nice story, and speaks ill of the nature of mankind. While safety is now upper most in the western countries where coal is still dug under ground—above-ground strip-mining is now more the norm—Chinese and Russian miners continue to work under conditions that we might call sub-human. But these two countries are not part of this tale, though some more detail here might, for once, have added a little to the story of coal.

Instead, DeMont sticks to telling us the story of Cape Breton's mining history, and how coal shaped the lives of Cape Bretoners. Company towns ruled the day. These offered housing—substandard to say the least—to the miners and their families, and kept them tied to the company store. This ensured that at the end of the month, the miners often owed more than they had earned and so kept them in constant poverty. It certainly was a sad chapter in Canadian history. Corruption by employers and by politicians is never far from the surface of this story.

It is also a revelation to learn that most of Nova Scotia's mines tunnel so deep down that it takes more than half an hour to reach the pit head. At the same time, many of the mines are under the ocean floor, heading toward Newfoundland. It boggles the mind to think of this. We have often heard stories about canaries that saved miners' lives, but there seldom is a story about the ponies used underground. DeMont enlightens us to a sad tale of abuse.

DeMont tries to bring his own family into the story. On his mother's side, they were miners, on his father's side they were not. Somehow, he fails to bring this part of the story alive. He also goes into too much detail about baseball teams that fought it out among mining towns. While one understands what the writer wanted to achieve, such details don't really enlighten the reader. It seems at time he merely lists statistics, names, and events without bringing out a story. As a consequence, I began to skip paragraphs, and felt tempted to skip pages.