Bøger af Kevin Corley

HISTORY COMES ALIVE in Kevin Corley's epic novel about the lives of coal miners and their families during the early 20th century. With mine owners employing gun thugs and the National Guard to suppress the new union, miners and their families fight bloody battles to secure a living wage and safer working conditions. As deep as the men descended down into the coal mines, so deep goes the reader into the inspiring stories of the immigrant and American born men and women who fueled the industrial revolution with coal, the black gold.

Charlie Birger's legend might have begun the day the sheriff allowed him to keep his Tommy gun in the jail cell with him. Or it might have begun the year he teamed up with the notorious Shelton Gang to fight a bloody war against Glenn Young and his 3,000 Ku Klux Klan members.Others might say it was how he lived his life, or, more importantly, how he ultimately died. No matter the reasons for Charlie's fame, everyone agrees he left behind a trail of gruesome corpses. This novel is based on the incredible true story of the Shelton and Birger Gangs who built bootlegging empires that rivaled anything found in Al Capone's Chicago during the prohibition years of the 1920s.

SIXTEEN TONS carries you down into the dark and dangerous coal mines of the early 1900s, as Italian immigrant Antonio Vacca and his sons encounter cave-ins and fires deep below the earth's surface. The dangers above ground are equally deadly, as the men and women battle gun thugs, corrupt sheriffs and crooked politicians at Virden, Matewan and Ludlow in an epic struggle to form a union and make the mines a safer place to work. Historian Kevin Corley's unique novel is based on oral histories of retired miners, their wives and their children that he collected. By staying true to their stories he has fashioned an honest, accurate and inspiring portrait of life among the coal mining families during those turbulent times. His oral histories and interviews were used by Carl Oblinger to write Divided Kingdom, a history of the coal mine wars

Coal mine wars. That's what they called the long, bloody conflict between rival unions that tore apart families and communities throughout Illinois during the 1930s. Hot-headed Vinnie Vacca sides with the newly-formed Progressive Miners of America. His stubborn brother Bullo fights for the established United Mine Workers while the coal mine bosses hire Chicago gun thugs from the Capone mob to spread death and fear across the landscape. Vinnie and Bullo's father Antonio struggles to make peace within the family-and the community-as the unending bombings and gunfights kill too many too young. This bloody story is based on actual events that occurred throughout Illinois from 1933 to 1937. A stunning sequel to Corley's acclaimed debut novel Sixteen Tons.