WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
by Thomas Geoghegan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
287 pages; $19.95
Brooding over a romance gone awry, Thomas Geoghegan wanted to get away from it all. Joining the French Foreign Legion was out, but a roommate talked him into volunteering as an observer at a dissident Mine Workers election. That was in 1972, and the beginning of Geoghegan's love affair with a "dumb, stupid, mastodon of a thing," a creature that shambles around "with half its brain gone." The object of his passion: organized labor.
Raised in the suburbs and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Geoghegan,...