I found this book to be a truly captivating representation of the hypocrisy and oppression that the early 20th century coal miners encountered. While the plot is not as notable as his earlier work, The Jungle; King Coal is laced with it's own gruesome depiction of the corruption caused by greed and

Slavery wasn't ended with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation or with the Union’s defeat of the Confederacy. Well into the Twentieth Century slavery prevailed throughout the United States. True, the buying and selling of human flesh was no longer practiced but the Industrial Revolution enslaved huma

Ιστορία εμπνευσμένη από τα γεγονότα που συγκλόνισαν το Κολοράντο του 1914, ξεκινώντας από την απεργία των ανθρακωρύχων της περιοχής μέχρι την πλήρη καταστολή της από τη συμμαχία κράτους - εταιρείας που οδήγησε στο θάνατο 18 ατόμων εκ των οποίων τα 10 ήταν παιδιά.
Διεισδυτικό ανάγνωσμα, το οποίο περιγ

What to say about this book?

Well. It's the original "slum tourism" aka poverty porn. It's the story of a rich kid, Hal Warner, who wonders what it's like for the other half. So he adopts a generic name and pretends to be just like one of the poor people (he legit fakes their accent and at one point

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Those lines, composed by Merle Travis and popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford, pretty much sum up the situation in coal mining that persisted

It's hard to believe that Upton Sinclair's novel is 100 years old. His prose has the stirring ring of universal truth -- a vibrancy and immediacy that casts his novel not as the document of past historical events or the portrait of an out-dated industrial period in American life, but as an ever-pres

Dismissing the book as socialist, atheist, outmoded, racist, propagandist, or with some other, yes, accurate (or semi-accurate) descriptor is an easy way to disengage from the actual issues and problems presented by the author and abrogate in oneself the feeling that those injustices so clearly enum

It’s interesting that an executive of Massey Energy was sentenced for criminal negligence with regard to a coal mine disaster on the very week I finished King Coal, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel about energy companies (the General Fuel Company), coal miners, and unions. Sinclair’s novel was abou

First of all, it's pretty awesome that Upton Sinclair brought attention to all of the issues that he did. It's even more awesome that he did it through a fictional medium which would be more appetizing and consumable to the broadly uneducated masses. It's amazing to think of it like that, that a man