Blind Brother

The year is 1880-something. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Tom Taylor and his twelve-year-old brother Bennie descend into the earth each morning, crawling through darkness to chip coal with their hands. Bennie has never seen the sun. Tom has seen too much of it only in glimpses between shifts. Their mother's grave needs a headstone. More urgently, Bennie needs an operation that might give him sight. The mines are their only option. Homer Greene, himself a Pennsylvania lawyer who once rescued six boys from a mine accident, wrote this novel at twenty-four. What he captured was the brutal arithmetic of poverty: how quickly a fall could bury a man's future, how strikes left families eating coal dust and despair, how children became men not when they turned eighteen but when they lost something they could never get back. This is a book about what brothers owe each other and what the world owes to no one. It aches. It endures.