Jeff Biggers - Writings

Writings

Winner of the Sierra Club's David Brower Award, "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland" is a family saga, part memoir, cultural history and journalistic investigation, examining the impact of coal mining on Biggers' native region of southern Illinois. Dating back to the removal of Native Americans, the nonfiction book laces the history of Biggers' family and the destruction of their 200-year-old historic community in the Shawnee forests into the development of the coal industry, from African slavery and coal mining, to a century of workplace safety and labor union struggles, to environmental and heritage movements against strip-mining and coal-fired plants. According to Publishers Weekly, "Part historical narrative, part family memoir, part pastoral paean, and part jeremiad against the abuse of the land and of the men who gave and continue to give their lives to (and often for) the mines, puts a human face on the industry that supplies nearly half of America’s energy…it offers a rare historical perspective on the vital yet little considered industry, along with a devastating critique of the myth of ‘clean coal.’ ”

The United States of Appalachia argues that beyond its mythology in the American imagination, Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-—a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence, and a hot bed for literature and music. Some of the most quintessential and daring American innovations, rebellions, and social movements have emerged from an area often stereotyped as a quaint backwater. In the process, immigrants from the Appalachian diaspora have become some of our nation's most famous leaders. The Asheville Citizen-Times reviewed it as a "masterpiece of popular history...revelations abound." According to a review in the San Antonio Express-News, the book is "full of historical insights...debunking stereotypes is one of the driving motivations behind Biggers' writing."

In an interview on National Public Radio, Biggers laid out chapters of the progressive history of Appalachia. Specifically, he noted:

∑ Appalachians formed the first District of Washington as a defiant outpost outside of British control

∑ Southern mountain insurgents orchestrated their own attacks on British-led troops, turning the tide of the American Revolution in the South

∑ From an Appalachian hamlet in North Carolina came Nina Simone, who went on to become an international diva with her blend of folk, jazz, and Bach-motif riffs

∑ Adolph Ochs, a young publisher from Chattanooga, took over the New York Times and set its course for world acclaim

∑ Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, one of the 20th century's most important labor leaders, drew from a long-time activist family in West Virginia

∑The first antislavery newspaper in America was founded in Tennessee, and Appalachians trained New England's legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison

∑ Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was recognized for her memoirs of West Virginia as much as for her literary contributions to the Far East

∑ Appalachia produced America's first woman muckraker Anne Royall, pioneering social realism author Rebecca Harding Davis, and literary innovators Martin Delany, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, James Still, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, among many others

∑ Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer, invented the first syllabary in modern times

∑ Blues icons, Bessie Smith and WC Handy, emerged from Appalachia's rich African American musical traditions

∑ Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee galvanized the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement

In the Sierra Madre is a memoir and narrative nonfiction history that chronicles the life and times in one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the native Raramuri/Tarahumara, Biggers examines the ways of a resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of the Mexican mountaineers, and the parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, hidden Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters like Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo and Pancho Villa, Biggers searches for the legendary treasures of the Sierra Madre (Mexico's Copper Canyon). In the Sierra Madre won the Gold Medal in Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards (Travel Essays) in 2006. The memoir was praised by Booklist as "an astonishing sojourn." The San Antonio Express-News reviewed that it was "full of historical insights, and unforgettable characters."