
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Coal and the Coast: a Reflection on the Pike River Disaster, by Paul Maunder (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 112 pp., $25.
It might be uncomfortable to consider, but pressing in on me as I write this — and on whoever reads it — are the ghosts of hundreds of Chinese coal miners: those who die every week in unsafe mines to fuel the booming economy of the renascent Red Dragon and thus supply us in the West with almost all of our consumer goods. Every phase of the Industrial Revolution has had a human cost, in the blood of peasants driven or lured off the land into burgeoning urban centres to make a new life for themselves and a fat profit for the owners of the factories and the mines.