Karenna Gore Schiff (Al Gore's daughter) has just written a book called "Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America." One of the women profiled is Irish immigrant labor advocate Mother Jones, who for decades fought for children, miners and others. "At the turn of the last century, for both unionists and industrialists, coal mining was a central battleground," writes Gore Schiff. "As the fuel that drove so many new industries, coal was an immensely profitable business. It was controlled by a small group of powerful men, none more powerful than John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil." This, of course, made Rockefeller and his fellow titans of the Gilded Age, enemies in the eyes of Mother Jones. In Lighting the Way, Gore Schiff does an admirable job of outlining Jones' fierce personality, as well as her accomplishments on behalf of miners and child laborers. "Mother Jones' march of the mill children put the issue of child labor on the public's radar screen and forced consumers to confront the suffering of the children who produced the goods they bought," Gore Schiff writes in her Introduction. Indeed, Jones' well-publicized 1903 march of underage mill workers from Philadelphia to New York certainly seemed to achieve her aim. "I am going to show Wall Street the flesh and blood from which it squeezes its wealth," Jones said. It was a series of personal tragedies that drew Jones into the labor battles of the 19th and 20th centuries, during which she often declared, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Jones' grandfather was hanged by the British as a traitor, and her father was forced to flee Ireland for defying British rule. Later, after she became a Memphis schoolteacher, she lost her husband and four children to a yellow fever epidemic. vieillepo0506.jpg She also lost her Chicago dressmaking business in the great fire of 1871, after which she became enraged at the gap between rich and poor. Jones died in 1930, but Gore Schiff does a fine of explaining why she remains relevant today. ($25.95 / 528 pages /Miramax Books)