"I listened for more than a year to the stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters, daughters. Sometimes I had to visit them in jail. They suffered outrageous injustices. As a witness I was forced, almost against my will, to become a smarter, more sympathetic human being. I saw rights I'd taken for granted denied to people I'd learned to care about. I came away with a heart deeply cautioned against the great American tradition of condemning the accused.
My hope for you, as a person now holding this book, is that the reading will bring you some of what the writing brought to me. Whether or not you can claim any interest in a gritty little town smack in the middle of nowhere that hosted a long-ago mine strike, I hope in the end you will care about its courage and sagacity. After all, Cannery Row is not really about a cannery, any more than Moby Dick is about whales. Without suggesting that this book contains the greatness of either of those (or in fact, any resemblance), I'll invoke them for the sake of encouraging readers to bring an open mind to Holding the Line. It is not precisely about the mine strike of 1983, and not at all about copper. It is, I think, about sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle.
