Reviewed by Rita Radostitz

When Maurice Ruddick finally emerged from Nova Scotia’s Springhill mine after spending nine days underground with little food, less water and no light, he walked into the spotlight of more than just the television cameras waiting at the mouth of the mine. He became known all over his county as the Afro-Canadian hero whose buoyant attitude and melodious voice eased the pain of his fellow miners during their ordeal of being trapped in a collapsed coal mine for more than a week. But as Melissa Fay Greene illustrates in Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster, Ruddick also became a symbol of the vestiges of segregation when, after hearing of the heroic survival of the Canadian miners, an aide to the governor of Georgia invited them to vacation on Jekyll Island, the state’s newest resort. Ruddick’s race had been veiled in the mine, but when he flew to Georgia, he learned that it would preclude him from staying at the luxury hotel his fellow miners would enjoy.

The highs and lows of Ruddick’s experiences add a delicate undertone to Last Man Out, Greene’s wonderfully textured tale of a terrible mining disaster that took the lives of seventy-five men in October, 1958.

Last Man Out tells the riveting stories of two groups of men trapped a mile below the surface of the earth completely in the dark, both literally and figuratively: They quickly exhausted the batteries of their flashlights, and had no idea whether others had survived, nor whether they would ever be found. Greene gives an hour-by-hour account of the events both above and under the surface of the mine from the moment of the big “bump;” deftly knitting the fears of the families left behind with the trials and triumphs of the miners trapped below. She skillfully avoids the sensationalism of tabloidesque descriptions of disasters by bringing to life the miners and their families as three-dimensional characters with heroic qualities and human flaws.

Few writers have the skill necessary to make a mining disaster that happened more than forty years ago in a foreign country sound interesting. Melissa Fay Greene makes it not only interesting, but enlightening, and a most enjoyable read.