Holding the line

It was the summer of 1983. Barbara Kingsolver had a day job as a scientific writer spending weekends cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist when she landed an assignment at a constellation of small, strike-gripped mining towns strung out across southern Arizona. Her mission was to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike. Over the year that followed Kingsolver stood with those miners and their families, increasingly engaged and heartbroken, as they cried out to a wide world that either refused to believe what was happening to them, or didn't care, or simply could not know. Kingsolver recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters, daughters. Sometimes visiting them in jail, witnessing the outrageous injustices they suffered. She saw rights she'd taken for granted denied to people she had learned to care about.