Gold Crown Press

As part of his intensive fieldwork on "Stripped: The Secret Life of Strip Miners," John Jacob Malone dug a twenty-foot hole in the woods behind his suburban New Jersey house and lived there for thirty days, subsisting on canned beans and energy drinks for an entire month as he attempted to experience, firsthand, what it's like to labor deep beneath the earth. Malone is an associate lecturer in anthropology with a concentration in Strip Mine Studies from the Center for Bituminous Inquiry. "Stripped" grew out of Malones’s fascination with his father, a strip miner who went to work deep inside the earth one morning and never returned, having succumbed to a hidden pocket of toxic gasses. "Stripped" draws on more than a thousand hours of interviews conducted with fifty professional strip miners in accordance with the highest anthropological standards. It is his first book.