4 out of 4 stars
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The Miner is a sweeping saga of one man’s life and adventures in the Australian outback. In it’s 511 pages one finds action, adventure, and romance. The story follows the life of Christopher Kennedy and some of his friends and family as he progresses from being an office clerk to being a multi billionaire mine owner and operator.
When we first meet Chris, he is a clerk in an investment firm. He is good at his job but he does not enjoy it. He enrolls in night school and gets a degree in mining engineering, something he enjoys. Chris decides not to hire on to a big company but to go into the Australian outback and try prospecting on his own. He wanders around the outback for some time and eventually finds gold but becomes lost and is near death when a native tribe befriends him and saves his life. Chris spends six months with them learning their ways and some of the mysteries of the outback. He then returns to civilization and goes about relocating and getting rights to the gold mine he had found. It turns out to be much bigger and more valuable that he could have guessed and is the start of his mining empire.
The Miner is a story that makes you feel good. Chris is hard working, kind, and generous. Throughout the book you see him being very lucky but, you also see him helping others and building a good life for his family and all those working around him. Reading this book reminded me a lot of reading some of the boy’sbooks from the early 1900’s. Books like The Boy Chums and The Rover Boys would be typical examples. The main characters in these books were often termed plucky. They had a lot of things go their way but they also put in a lot of hard work and helped others along the way.
This book takes place in Australia, primarily in the outback. They have different expressions for many things and the author uses the local vernacular throughout the book. Most of the words or expressions are understandable enough that they do not need explanation. Some were very foreign to me but most of those were understandable by the context or in several places the author gave definitions of words where the meanings were hard to guess.
The book is a little long, but, since it made me feel good, I did not mind the length that much. I also enjoyed the occasional geological tidbit explaining why the area looked the way it did, how it may have been formed, or why certain minerals might be found there. This book is a good read for a wide audience. It has adventure, romance, and tells the saga of life and fortunes in the Australian outback.
I found a few errors while reading. Things like using the word “change”, when the word should nave been “changed”, or “enrol”, when the word should have been “enroll”. Certainly there were not enough errors to detract from the reading of the book and not enough to detract from the rating. I give this book a rating of 4 out of 4 stars. It was enjoyable and kept you wondering what would happen next.
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The miner
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