Undermined in Coal Country

As much as by chronology or theme, his book proceeds via metaphors, myths, and the literature he reads, studies, and teaches. He works such motifs as the "undermining" of his title and the "measures" of his subtitle — a reference to seams of anthracite — to consider what the region’s history of mining reveals about human folly and endeavor.

Surrounded by anti-intellectualism, poverty, and the environmental degradation that inevitably attended the burst of extractive capitalism that swept through and then abandoned so much of the United States, Conlogue articulately makes a calm but passionate plea for keeping the humanities central to a curriculum that legislators and college administrators relentlessly want to divert toward vocationalism.

In the Scranton area, history is buried literally and figuratively. The remnants of a once vibrant coal industry lurk underground; the sweep of time has effaced a legacy of environmental damage and social turmoil. Bill Conlogue's insightful book masterfully takes stock of transformations in the region's present by uncovering much of its forgotten past.

In Undermined in Coal Country, Bill Conlogue has achieved a heart-rending expose of the damage done heedless mining practices and greed to his hometown and the whole of coal country and a powerful metaphor of the human condition with the hope that studies of the arts and humanities may offer.