Once the Tri-State lead and zinc mining area of chunks of Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri was the world's most productive. It was also socially the toughest, roughest and most dangerous from falling rocks, premature explosions of dynamite and just plain murder. This historical fiction is how a young boy grew up to meet his career destiny, dream of being a circus lion-tamer. The author writes with humor, insight, sensitivity and the brutality of daily life. The author could have been the sensitive young man protagonist of Hard Rock, this book. Today the Tri-State is the most polluted, depressed spot on the planet earth. Everything is totally ruined, even the people still there, but they live on-still some with dreams of a better day that has not yet come.