In fall 1958, mining was commonplace in Nova Scotia, as were the disasters that were prone to hit the underground tunnels. The small town of Springhill brimmed with strapping young men who never seemed to find their way out, trapped in the cramped, black levels of earth.

On the evening of Oct. 23, 174 of those men were as unsuspecting as sitting ducks.

That's an awful simile. And had it appeared in author Melissa Fay Greene's book about a historic mining disaster, it would have been a merciful respite from 305 pages of atrocious prose riddled with ceaseless similes and redundant redundancies.

Example, from Chapter 25: "Finally the blackness over the men was opaque and thick and shining. Whether their eyelids were open or shut made no difference. All the batteries were dead. A man could sit slack-jawed, he could dig into his nose with his forefinger, he could scratch his butt or his scrotum, because the utter darkness was as solid as the waxed exterior of a new shiny black Buick.

As if heavy polished doors were slammed shut on both sides and a hard black roof curved over his head, each man was locked in alone by the darkness."

The award-winning author's third book, Last Man Out, chronicles 19 miners' weeklong battle to stay alive and their families' undying hope. Greene uses historical documentation and interviews to piece together the story while intertwining the tale of the racist governorship of Georgia, an awkward amalgam.

Though insistent that this is a nonfiction story based on survivor accounts, Greene produces a melodramatic atmosphere peppered with pedestrian prose.

She begins by presenting her cast of characters: the black "singing miner" who shoveled coal to support his wife and 12 children; a 25-year-old Elvis Presley knockoff; countless journeymen who abhorred the mines as much as their disaster-weary wives did.

It was the miner's code, an unwritten oath of camaraderie, that kept them going - a code that unraveled on that October evening. Two bumps came without warning, shaking the earth and killing 75.

Greene explains the phenomenon:

"When the end of the No. 2 mine happened, it came not as a cave-in. Instead, the rock floor heaved upwards. From an oceanic depth, a ball of fiery gas threw off its stone layers, like a feverish child in the night angrily kicking off his covers.The deepest stone floor rose faster than an elevator. It smashed into the floor above it, and the two, stacked together, hurtled up into a third, like granite dominoes falling upward.

If this were an office building, the fifth floor would be smashing up into the sixth floor and carrying it up into the seventh."

The facts are disturbing. One man's elbow is pinned between two beams. The pressure of mile-high rock and lumber leaves him in excruciating pain.

His comrades won't help him because the lumber is supporting the ceiling.

They were forced to improvise: They drank their own urine, gnawed on bark and reminisced about times past to stay sane. By the time the rescuers arrived, the miners were heroes.

Some took up an invitation to the Ed Sullivan Show. Others agreed to an all-expenses-paid trip to Georgia, despite the fact that it was a marketing ploy to boost tourism in a segregationist state.

Standing alone on the merits of the facts, Last Man Out is intriguing. But after 10 chapters, the reader feels as confined as the miners; there's no way out of the pitch-black tunnels. And there's no way out of the maudlin maze produced by poor writing that muddles a book that could have been condensed considerably.

The story of the Springhill miners is unique and disturbing. But the strength lies in the facts, not their presentation.

Valerie Singleton is a freelance writer living in Denver.