You can’t escape it. It’s like having a sewer crew show up in front of your house with jackhammers and roaring trucks and hissing compression lines and guys shouting at each other for, say, a month.

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I think they will pay a huge price for it in the next round of elections. Americans are notorious, of course, for confusing everything and backing the wrong horse. But there was no wrong horse in this race, just a big horse pulling a wagon full of money for people out of work, out of time, almost out of hope.

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Page through lists like these and you learn a lot about who was working in the mines in 1906. Look at the “Nationality” column for the dead: Italian, English, Slovene, Hungarian, Scots, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Austrian. Every one of the dozens of pages I collected was the same way, a vast collection, mainly eastern Europeans, who died underground in Pennsylvania.

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But it you are writing a book, you have to keep your eyes open about who is going to do what for you. It’s unlikely you will get a major publisher to take on your work unless you have a name that everyone already knows, for whatever reason. That being the case, you will most likely not give up on the project and eventually decide to self-publish.

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