The early phase of industrialization in America devestated many lives by what the author calls 'The Fiery Furnace Effect.' Not only were the initial participants affected, but much of the effect, through them, was carried over into the subsequent generation, and beyond in some cases. This novel focuses upon the intergenerational impact for two decades in the life of young Adam Vasilyevich, born out of wedlock in 1926 in the 'Loch Jean' coal camp of 'Paine County,' West Virginia. His early personal development, in what Borges would call his 'green Garden,' is detailed, as is the subsequent series of events that strip him of his human connections and even his identity. Then he is uprooted from his native soil, like a hickory sapling, and is banished into, for Adam, the urban wilderness of Detroit. There, he is abandoned by his mother, who was his last bond to his previous existence. For six years thereafter, Adam is increasingly demoralized and estranged from his life and from his own self. At that point, he is surely on a path toward a life of crime and self destruction, but a fortunate stroke of fate provides new opportunities for a meaningful and gratifying life. However, Adam has been beaten into a feckless, alienated condition for so long that it is highly problematic whether or not he can marshall any inner resources to take advantage of the new circumstances in Melville Township.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

Under suspicion of setting fire to some fields, a group of boys from a village in Crete are incarcerated and tortured by officials hoping to implicate the boys' parents

First US Edition -- The first comprehensive book on whaling wives at sea written for a general audience.