Black Diamonds

Black Diamonds, Blue Flames by Catherine Young is a literary memoir of Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley, the place that fueled the nation for over a century. As a girl in the 1960s, Young lived amid burning mountains of waste coal above ground and mine fires beneath her feet, longing for the green, lovely scene portrayed in The Lackawanna Valley, George Inness' 1855 painting. She shows readers the valley through child's eyes, passing through the immigrant kitchens, relief lines, and...
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Black Diamonds, Blue Flames by Catherine Young is a literary memoir of Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley, the place that fueled the nation for over a century. As a girl in the 1960s, Young lived amid burning mountains of waste coal above ground and mine fires beneath her feet, longing for the green, lovely scene portrayed in The Lackawanna Valley, George Inness' 1855 painting. She shows readers the valley through child's eyes, passing through the immigrant kitchens, relief lines, and soot-stained alleys of a collapsing city.