To some, it may come as a surprise that Mother Jones was a woman before she was a magazine, just as to many it has come as a surprise lately that something besides World War I happened between 1900 and 1920….

But Mary Lee Settle hasn't forgotten. The Scapegoat … remembers those years and people superbly. And if, as it appears, there is a renascence of interest in that perhaps deliberately forgotten "golden age" of native radicalism in America, The Scapegoat's timing is as right as its memory.

Though not a "strike novel," The Scapegoat uses as its focus a coal miners' strike in West Virginia in 1912. Whether it is based on a real strike is beside the point: it is fictionally real and fictionally accurate…. When you finish The Scapegoat, you know how it felt to be alive in 1912 during a coal miners' strike in West Virginia. The rest...