Coal made modern America. It built the factories and ships that won a terrible war and fueled the greatest peacetime economic expansion in history. The American Century came at a cost: the lives and health of the men who wrested coal from the ground. This is the story of how a long career in the most dangerous of jobs helped one soldier rebuild his shattered life, day by day, ton by ton-an inside look at how a miner learns to judge the mountain overhead, his fellow miners, and himself.