Books & Essays

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  Title:
  An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God
  
  Date Published:
  Riverhead 2009

  Description:
  Erik Reece’s grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Erik’s father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not coincidentally, Jesus’ age when he was crucified— Erik’s father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.
  
  So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson’s famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an “American gospel” coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and intellectual peace with his own American soul.
  
  The result of Reece’s journey is a deeply personal but also deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political, and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call on to combat them.
  
  Book Review #1:
  

  From Publishers Weekly

  Sometimes religious inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. Reece, author of the award-winning Lost Mountain, is the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. His own religious world-view, however, comes not from traditional Protestant Christianity, but from American thinkers such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, William James and the lesser-known scientist Lynn Margulis. The author intercalates his personal story, which is one of great tragedy, with those of these great historical figures. His goal is not quite clear from the outset, but that is the point. He is searching for a form of Christianity that he can live with, since he believes that the usual sources are unhelpfully dogmatic. The primary tension is a classic one: the struggle between the material and spiritual worlds. Reece is unconvinced by his stern grandfather's brand of Christianity, based more on the punitive teachings of Paul, he believes, than those of Jesus. The kingdom of God can be found, at least partly, right now—no need to slog through life in order to celebrate one's reward in the hereafter. There are disjointed moments in the narrative, but the overall project is commendable.
  
  

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• 

  Title:
  Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia
  
  Date Published:
  Riverhead 2007

  Description:
  A new form of strip mining has caused a state of emergency for the Appalachian wilderness and the communities that depend on it-a crisis compounded by issues of government neglect, corporate hubris, and class conflict. In this powerful call to arms, Erik Reece chronicles the year he spent witnessing the systematic decimation of a single mountain and offers a landmark defense of a national treasure threatened with extinction.
  
  Book Review #1:
  

  From Publishers Weekly

  Reece's up-close assessment of a rapacious coal industry is a searing indictment of how a country's energy lust is ravaging the hills and hollows of Appalachia. The first-time author chronicles how, in one year, from October 2003 to September 2004, strip miners sheared away the top of Kentucky's aptly named Lost Mountain. This process of "mountaintop removal" left a barren wasteland that, months earlier, had supported songbirds, fox, deer and other wildlife, and a rich cover of trees. Reece's elegiac book—much more than just an eyewitness report on ecological decimation—also offers a concise history of how the coal industry long exploited workers; hints at harrowing tales of industry intimidation of antimining activists; details how toxic mining runoff has poisoned well water and how landslides have washed away homes and entire hamlets; and in a cautiously optimistic coda, reports how activists have reclaimed a few thousand acres of stripped land with reforestation projects. The Kentucky-born author, who canoed clean Appalachian rivers as a youth, has written an impassioned account of a business rife with industrial greed, devious corporate ownership and unenforced environmental laws. It's also a heartrending account of the rural residents whose lives are being ruined by strip-mining's relentless, almost unfettered, encroachment.
  
  Book Review #2:
  

  From Booklist

  *Starred Review* Criminal. That's the word that comes to mind upon reading Reece's excoriating expose of the coal industry's pernicious rape of the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Once the site of the oldest and most ecologically diverse forest in the country, now this stretch of Appalachian wilderness has gone from being a verdant North American rain forest to a bleak and dismal lunar landscape, thanks to the severely destructive strip-mining process known as "mountaintop removal." Under this radical form of coal retrieval, ore is mined by literally blasting away tops of mountains, dumping waste into the valleys below, burying streams, polluting wells, undermining buildings, and altering fragile ecologies. Reece spent a year intimately observing and chronicling the demolition of the ironically named Lost Mountain, hiking to its summit, fording its streams' headwaters, interviewing its residents, and visiting cemeteries to pay respect to those who ultimately succumbed to the pollution and violence perpetrated in the name of energy efficiency and economic viability. The tale of Kentucky's mutilated environment is one that, like the mountain, has been lost. Resounding kudos to Reece for vividly bringing this critical story to light. Carol Haggas
  
  

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