Review
Brian Leung's haunting, lyrical love story is a powerful parable about how someone's personal history can be superseded by the creative machinations of those involved in writing history. When Addie Maine first arrives in Dire, Wyoming, she learns that the remote mining town got its unique name from the dire straits of two intrepid brothers, early miners who perished in a snowstorm, whose skeletal remains are the stuff of local legend. She is struck by the fact that there are no facts to substantiate any of it. Wise beyond her 19 years, Addie reflects, "And wasn't that the way of history? Strangers looking at strangers from afar, telling what was knowable, filling in the rest with interesting guesses."
Indeed, powers beyond her control keep supplanting Addie's own story. The erasure begins when the young woman decides to pack all her belongings, leave Kentucky and join...
Beyond the Book
During much of the second half of the 19th century, the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) was able to maintain a monopoly on coal production because it controlled the only means of transportation into the Western territories. Thus it owned and operated all the coalmines, fixed coal prices to its own benefit and was able to establish its own standards - or lack of - for employee treatment and compensation. In 1875, UP cut the piecework rate paid to miners by one-fifth but made no corresponding reduction in prices charged at the Company stores. When the miners went on strike, UP responded by practicing a kind of reverse outsourcing, replacing striking laborers with recently immigrated Chinese laborers who accepted the lower pay.
Indignation and antipathy by White...
