Digging Our Own Graves

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith’s essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

Now available in Spanish, the bestselling book in which a leaner Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee shares his secrets for creating better health habits that last a lifetime.

A twelve-year-old grave thief gets caught up in a royal heist in this compelling middle-grade fantasy in the vein of Kelley Armstrong's A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying. Twelve-year-old Spade is a grave thief. With his father and brother, he digs up the recently deceased to steal jewels, the main form of trade in Wyndhail. Digging graves works for Spade -- alone in the graveyard at night, no one notices his limp or calls him names. He's headed for a lifetime of theft when his father comes up with the audacious plan to rob a grave in the Wyndhail castle cemetery. Spade and his brother get caught in a royal trap, and Spade must find the master of the Woegan: a deadly creature that is stalking the castle by night. Along the way, he meets Ember, the queen's niece, and together they race to solve the mystery of the legendary Deepstones and their connection to the Woegan, the queen, a missing king and the mysterious pebble Spade finds in the Wyndhail cemetery. This is a fantastic story of friendship, bravery, grief and acceptance.

Until we perceive our bodies as the temple of God; satan will continue to come against us through a gluttonous spirit. It is his pleasure to see the people of God plagued with obesity, sickness, and diseases. And when he has crippled this powerful nation, the cry unto heaven will be great. We must obey the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and live: Take heed to yourselves, lest at anytime your heart be overcharged (overworked) with surfeiting (overeating) and the cares of this life. And that day (of sickness and disease) come upon you unawares (without warning). For as a trap shall it come on all them that dwell on the whole earth . Luke 21:34. Obesity, sickness, and disease has no respect of person. The great and the small shall die an untimely death in this great nation if we do not take a stand against these deadly plagues. As far back as I can remember, Obesity rest, ruled, and abide over me and continued to do so well into my adulthood. At the age of 55 obesity and it's related diseases took it's toil on my body; thus sickness came upon me like a thief in the night, robbing me of my quality of life. Through dreams and visions from the word of God, I learn how to program my mind to succeed and overcome a gluttonous spirit. Today my will to live is far greater than my foolishness to die. I tell of my uphill journey to recovery in this powerful book.

The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered. The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.

Jamie Mason spins the gripping story of lonely widower and accidental murderer Jason Getty, who lives with the guilt of having buried his victim in his backyard, only to discover two other bodies, a man and a woman, when his garden is dug up by a landscaping firm. The persistent detectives investigating the two murders are at first unaware of the third, but old blood stains soon reveal its existence. Jason is thrown into a macabre plot of trying to cover up his deed while forging a soul-redeeming friendship with Leah, the dead man's fearless widow.Mason is a master of tight plot-weaving and deep empathy for all of her characters, no matter how flawed. The causes and consequences of their crimes are brilliantly illuminated. Readers will fall in love with the book's most loveable character, a heroic dog who is the best detective and truth-seeker of them all.Jamie Mason is the managing editor of the popular authorscoop.com and lives with her family in North Carolina. Three Graves Full is her first novel.

"Life as a gravedigger was tough. Now that I'm dead, it's even worse."