Product Description

"The women tell remarkable stories of their lives and actions. . . . This book pays powerful tribute to their resolve and passion for economic justice." --Publishers Weekly

"Like Kingsolver's fiction, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters--only this time the characters are real."--Journal of the Southwest

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #554513 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Several mining towns have grown up around the rich Morenci copper pit in southern Arizona, each ruled to a certain extent by the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. In 1983, the company tried to freeze wages and deny the miners cost-of-living protection. The resulting strike lasted a long and miserable 18 months; management ultimately won its bid to have the union decertified but its business was damaged in the process, and the strikers took some comfort in a series of legal victories that, suggesting a discriminatory pattern of law enforcement, kept the labor activists out of jail. Journalist and novelist Kingsolver (The Bean Trees) has written a stirring partisan account of the role the area’s women played in holding the strike and in keeping families and communities together, despite the strike’s failure. The women tell remarkable stories of their lives and actions, displaying the strength that led one corporate official to remark, "If we could just get rid of these broads, we’d have it made." This book pays powerful tribute to their resolve and passion for economic justice.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal
In 1983, after the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation demanded an unprecedented amount of pay and benefits cuts, a union consortium, consisting of mostly Hispanic women, held a strike in four small Arizona mining towns. The women's lives were transformed. Their culture had confined them to limited roles; they now became leaders, strategists, spokespersons, and morale-boosters. The first-person narratives of these women dominate this account of the 18-month strike, written by novelist Kingsolver, author of The Bean Trees (LJ 2/1/88) and Homeland and Other Stories ( LJ 5/15/89). While this format is interesting, fewer quotations and additional industry and strike background would have made the account more effective. Despite these reservations, the book will interest readers of labor studies, women's studies, and community/ethnic studies.
- Frieda Shoenberg Rozen, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Kingsolver's first nonfiction effort is a treatment of the women on the strike line in the 1983 Phelps-Dodge copper mine strike in Arizona. In her lengthy introduction, Kingsolver admits she was unable to avoid taking sides, and Toren adopts the author's empathetic tone. In addition, she offers one vocal characterization for the various Mexican-American strikers and handles Spanish pronunciations with ease. Toren captures the miners' frustration and resentment as each relates tales of teargassing, arrests, and betrayal with outrage, bitter sarcasm and wit. Toren seems perfectly in step with the author's treatment of events that just couldn't happen in America but did. L.V.B. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine