Last Man Out, Melissa Fay Greene
Last Man Out, Melissa Fay Greene
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Last Man Out
The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster

Author: Melissa Fay Greene

Narrator: Henry Strozier

Unabridged: 9 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/06/2008

Synopsis

One evening in late October 1958, the deepest coal mine in North America "bumped"-its rock floors heaved up and smashed into rock ceilings. Most of the men on the shift perished. But nineteen men were trapped alive a mile below the earth's surface, struggling to survive without food, water, light, or fresh air. Almost a week passed without rescue. Hopes of finding life dwindled; then a miracle happened: Rescuers stumbled across a broken pipe that led to the cave of survivors. In the media circus that followed, the survivors' endurance was mythologized and twisted, and the state of Georgia's tourism ploy-inviting the survivors to recuperate on a Georgia beach-turned racist and pitted the miners against each other.Using long-lost stories and interviews with survivors, Greene has reconstructed an extraordinary drama of their struggle and miraculous rescue.

About Melissa Fay Greene

Melissa Fay Greene is the author of the National Book Award finalists Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing, as well as Last Man Out and There Is No Me Without You. New York University's journalism department named Praying for Sheetrock one of the top one hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century, and her books have earned numerous other accolades. Melissa has written for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest, among other publications. She lives with her husband and nine children in Atlanta.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Stefanie on January 03, 2024

Springhill Mine in Springhill, Nova Scotia experienced what is known in the mining world as a "bump" on October 23, 1958. A bump is scientifically known as underground seismic activity, usually resulting from the collapse of support pillars inside of the mine. This particular event began as a small......more

Goodreads review by Enikő on November 01, 2011

Another one of those books that you read and then can't stop thinking about. It was very well written. Everyone's personalities were so well described that the reader really got a sense of who everyone was. I had been surprised to see that the author was American, but when I read and saw the America......more

Goodreads review by Judd on September 20, 2020

I never thought I would need to look up the "spoiler" formatting for a non-fiction book, but here we are. "Last Man Out" by Melissa Greene is an intriguing and unpredictable exploration of the 1958 Springhill Mine Disaster in Nova Scotia. Like many typical disaster accounts, it follows a cast of char......more

Goodreads review by Kj on August 26, 2023

Depths of 13500 and 14000 feet, digging for combustible coal, fighting off the firedamp and afterdamp gases. Buried alive for a week, has to be close to anyone's worst nightmare. The Springhill mine system No2 floors smashed upwards into each other with pockets of survival under ruin of rock and coa......more

Goodreads review by Laura on March 30, 2015

Technically I only made it about two-thirds of the way through this book, which is when the story of the rescue ended and the story of the aftermath, including a lot of stuff about a state-sponsored holiday to racially-segregated Georgia, which was supposed to be great tourism advertising of the sta......more

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