There is little attempt in “Storming Heaven” to delineate broad social currents or to deal with the strike as a mass movement in the manner of Zola or the Russian novelists. If this stringent economy gives the book a wounding impact, it also necessitates that much of the historical material must be treated by implication and in secondhand report. So then, we have three decades of social upheaval revealed by four narrators in 277 pages. Rondal Justice), a miner who becomes a union organizer Carrie Bishop, a courageous and intelligent mountain girl who becomes a nurse and, despite herself, a union activist, and Rosa Angelelli, an Italian immigrant who works as housekeeper for one of the mine owners. Marcum, a native proto-Socialist who becomes a mayor he is one of the four narrators who tell the story. The story begins in 1890, “two years before the land was give out from under us to the coal company,” as one of the characters puts it. Its finest ambitions are artistic, and it is hard to see that it has any political aims at all except the ancient and honorable one of discovering injustice and holding it up to the pitiless witness of history.Īnd its artistic ambitions are beautifully vindicated.

The mine guards-who were mostly criminals from Chicago and called “gun thugs” by the mountaineers-killed strikers and their children indiscriminately and often raped the women before murdering them too.Ī reader is likely to come away from “Storming Heaven” in a fury of helpless indignation, but this is no propaganda novel.

The Army used poison gas against the workers and bombed them from airplanes.

After valiant bloody struggle with local and state police and with mine guards paid by the coal companies, the miners lost their battle when President Warren G. Giardina has written a historical novel about the Battle of Blair Mountain, which occurred in West Virginia in 1921, when 10,000 striking miners attempted to take control of the corrupt governments of two counties. To these titles must now be added Denise Giardina’s “Storming Heaven.” It is a brilliant diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, heartwarming, tough and tender. Ibelieve I am correct in saying that critical consensus has named James Still’s “River of Earth” and John Yount’s “Hardcastle” as the classic novels about coal mining in the southern Appalachian mountains.

Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina