A review by melaniemaksin
Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell

4.0

My Slovak relatives recommended this book because they thought it did an excellent job of capturing the Slovak experience in America (and, more specifically, in Pittsburgh). Even my dad and his cousins could relate to it--their fathers still worked in the mills in the 1950s and sixties (and in some cases, if they lived that long, in the seventies), everyone was in the union, grandparents and unmarried uncles and boarders filled the spare rooms in their homes, etc. It's not the most elegantly written book, but the story's certainly interesting, and it made me appreciate how rapidly things change, even in just a generation or two.