The very wild and extremely wonderful Whites of West Virginia are a close-knit, hard-partying, hard-living family of outlaws and misfits, Appalachian royalty, the descendants of renown mountain dancer D. Ray White and his wife the “miracle woman” Birtie Mae. Like the majority of Boone County residents, D. Ray grew up working in the coalmines. He contracted cancer and left the mines to perform his unique style of dance, but was murdered after the filming of Talking Feet, the PBS documentary about him.

The Nobel Laureate Playwright. George Bernard Shaw knew well the human condition when he observed that, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history, ” and that, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Jeff Biggers new book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: the secret legacy of coal in the heartland, is a vivid illustration of our willingness to justify destructive behavior today by recreating a history that never existed in the first place.