I knew him when...

So I am happy to see that a guy I went to grad school with was awarded the biggest prize in American history, the Bancroft Prize. For his first book, no less! The book is Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. It is about mining in the west, not in the Appalachian killing fields. I will confess to not having read it yet, though the fawning reviews (even in the New Yorker, which is uncommon for an academic book) ever since it came out made me think it was a good one. And that he had a good publicist.

For the moment I am putting whatever energy I might have to spare for reading about mining in the west mostly into Pynchon's typically magisterial and gargantuan Against the Day. And I am in a holding pattern in that book, no river landing in sight just yet for me.

Andrews' acheivement seems especially impressive when you figure he is sharing the prize with Drew Gilpin Faust, a fine historian and the president of some school up in the northeast*, and Pekka Hämäläinen, who not only has one of the coolest last names possible but who wrote a book I have read which is indeed a masterpiece: The Comanche Empire.









*(yup, that very same one that trained the Wall Street wizards who created the credit default swap)

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