“Blast!” Is a book that tells the tale of 18 major disasters in Cape Bretons coal mining history. These have been classified as major disasters because 3 or more people died during each of these happenings.

This book was a wild ride for me. I went into this knowing nothing about coal mining. At all. Other than they mine coal. And I came out of this book with a wealth of knowledge about the different jobs in a coal mining operation, the draegermen (who were Cape Bretons mine rescue team), and unfortunately, the many ways tragedy stuck in the Cape Breton coal mining operations.

Going into this book I thought it would be a bit of a drag. Not a bad thing, as a lot of books I like to read I classify as a “drag” aka an informational text that takes sooooo long to get through and is so hard to read because of the jargon and field knowledge. But this book was the opposite of a drag. It was still very informative, and detail oriented, yet it didn’t feel like I was reading 1000 paragraphs all in one page. It was nicely laid out and the stories were told in a way that it was riveting yet informative all at the same time.

I thought this was a really interesting read, and the fact that the author himself was a coal miner, and was getting as much of his information from older coal miners who were still around really takes the cake for me with this book. I enjoy texts that involve disasters, how they happen, and how they’re handled. And this book met those expectations. So I’m quite happy!