Eaton's own book covers the events of the era much more thoroughly than does Van Dommelen's, which is more romanticized and personalized than the writings of Eaton himself. Van Dommelen's book suffers from a lack of chronological organization and succinct summaries, and nowhere does he provide a bibliography ofAllen Eaton's writings. The author cannot seem to decide whether or not he writes about the Southern "Highlands" Handicraft Guild or the Southern "Highland" Handicraft Guild and uses the terms interchangeably. The proper word is "Highland," and despite Eaton's often professed love for the term "handicrafts" that word, too, was replaced in the 1990s by "craft" in the Guild's working title. I arrived in Asheville to work for the Guild three years after Eaton's death and never was fortunate enough to know the "dean of American crafts," but I can personally attest to the respect and affection toward Allen Eaton felt by the craftspeople of the region. He was, and still is, a legendary friend of the Guild, the mountain arts, and of anything of beauty. Eaton's gentle, compassionate nature comes across in Van Dommelen's biography, and it's also evident that Eaton was a strong voice for personal equality and human kindness. His love of beauty and his strength of character are detailed; the remarkable Allen Eaton is even more interesting in fact than in legend. I do wish Van Dommelen had included more facts and less gossip about Eaton and Clementine Douglas, the founder of The Spinning Wheel Shop in Asheville. While this is a book all who've studied Allen Eaton should read, it is not the compelling study this great man deserves. —Garry Barker Hubert Skidmore. Hawk's Nest. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 350 pages. Paperback. $13.57. Hubert Skidmore's 1941 novel Hawk's Nest is a searing indictment against the greed of American capitalism and the suffering that it caused the numbers of people who worked on the Gauley Bridge tunnel in West Virginia in the early 1930s. A proletarian novel in the tradition of John Steinbeck's The Grapes ofWrath, Hawk's Nest recounts the story of scores of dispossessed Americans who converged upon the West Virginia mountains in the early years of the Great Depression with the promise of jobs and the hope of better days for themselves and their families. While they indeed found jobs, they were not 71 prepared for the dangers under which those jobs existed, nor were they prepared for the untold injustices visited upon them by a company that was more interested in the bottom line than in the welfare of workers or for a community that was not prepared for the disruption caused by the migration of vast numbers of strangers and outsiders to their formerly peaceful hills. Skidmore skillfully weaves a tapestry of horror from the individual stories of the Reip family, West Virginia hillbillies trying to escape their worn out farm; Lessie Lee Rucker, recently abandoned by her husband; newlyweds Lock and Daisy Mullens, casting their lot anew; Jim Martin, Long Legg, and Owl Jones, an interracial band of hoboes in search of better times; Ralph Owens, an out-of-work insurance salesman from Elmira, New York, whose only concern is his wife and daughters; and scores of other families and individuals who made their way from all points of the United States in search of work. For a short period of time, the work was fine, and these and other men and women thought that perhaps their lives were on the verge of improvement. But then the men who worked in the tunnel began to experience problems with breathing, and the matter grew worse day by day. What the company officials called "tunnelitis," was ultimately diagnosed as "silicosis," a pulmonary disease for which there was no cure. In all, the death toll from the disease numbered in the thousands, most of those African Americans who had the worstjobs for which they received the least pay. Not only is Hawk's Nest the story of "the worst industrial disaster in American history," it recounts again just how ill-treated are the "wretched of the earth...
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Jan 1, 2008
Marga Altena 
Open Access
