This book is described by Nor Hall as "a praise-piece to duplicitous metal-artful and harrowing-and to its handlers." Part One, "Irons in the Fire," is a prose character sketch of iron and iron workers, "the people who work iron and can't keep their hands off it." These are strangely passionate people (the real "Iron Johns" and "Janes"!) with "a compulsion to adore that binds them in an essential community of iron men and ferrous women." Offering a history, mythology, and psychology of the element iron, both alchemical and industrial, this work is a major addition to the tradition of non-dogmatic psychological commentary on myth that includes Jung, Bachelard, and James Hillman, to which Hall adds a profoundly feminist dimension.