Work Music (Two Medication Nation)

“If America was a melting pot, Butte can be its boiling level,” observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant instructor, strolling encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer final seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig’s 2006
The Whistling Season. A decade later, Morrie is again in Montana, because the beguiling narrator of
Work Music.

Lured like so many others by “the richest hill on earth,” Morrie steps off the prepare in Butte, copper-mining capital of the world, in its jittery heyday of 1919. However whereas riches elude Morrie, as soon as once more a colourful forged of native characters-and their dramas-seek him out: a look-alike, sound-alike pair of retired Welsh miners; a streak-of-lightning waif so skinny that he’s dubbed Russian Famine; a pair of mining firm goons; a comely landlady propitiously named Grace; and an eccentric boss on the public library, his whispered nickname a supply of inexplicable terror. When Morrie crosses paths with a full of life former scholar, now engaged to a fiery younger union chief, he’s caught up within the mounting conflict between the iron-fisted mining firm, radical “exterior agitators,” and the beleaguered miners. And as tensions above floor and under attain the explosion level, Morrie finds a singular technique to give a voice to those that really want one.

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