Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

Description

In Amity and Prosperity, the prizewinning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold exposes the tattered edges of the social fabric in rural America. In a work rich with narrative suspense, she explores the volatile personalities and politics of a small Allegheny town that has an abundance of natural gas but no municipal water supply. The result is a definitive guide to the fracking debate, and to the larger social and environmental hazards that are upending rural America. Stacey Haney, a lifelong resident of Amity, Pennsylvania, is struggling to support her children when the fracking boom comes to town. Like most of her neighbors, she sees the energy companies' payments as a windfall. Soon trucks are rumbling down her unpaved road and a fenced-off fracking site rises on adjacent land. But her annoyance gives way to concern and then to fear as domestic animals and pets begin dying and mysterious illnesses strike her family-despite the companies' insistence that nothing is wrong. Griswold masterfully chronicles Haney's transformation into an unlikely whistle-blower as she launches her own investigation into corporate wrongdoing. As she takes her case to court, Haney inadvertently reveals the complex rifts in her community and begins to reshape its attitudes toward outsiders, corporations, and the federal government. Amity and Prosperity uses her gripping and moving tale to show the true costs of our energy infrastructure and to illuminate the predicament of rural America in the twenty-first century.

Eliza Griswold, a Guggenheim fellow, is the author of a collection of poems, Wideawake Field, and a nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, a New York Times bestseller that was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She is the translator of I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan.

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction New York Times Book Review Notable Book [A] wonderful account, the deserved winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction . . . The virtue of Griswold's reporting is that, though it's never sentimental, you understand and sympathize with these men and women. --Bill McKibben, The Times Literary Supplement Expertly constructed . . . Griswold -- the kind of reporter who can convince a subject to let her reveal the message inside a Valentine card, and who notices what color somebody's refrigerator is -- painstakingly builds the narrative amid its historical and social context . . . Her relentless, measured narration helped me understand my own blind spots -- that sadness over ruined views is a kind of class privilege, the outgrowth of a particular stance toward the land. --Erika Howsare, Los Angeles Review of Books Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals who've endured sequential boom bust cycles of resource extraction . . . tough, reluctant victim-heroes . . . and a courtroom drama, as a tenacious husband-wife legal team takes on the industry and the state . . . [a] valuable, discomforting book --JoAnn Wypijewski, The New York Times Book Review Riveting . . . Page-turner . . . If J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy famously portrayed the Rust Belt ethos of Appalachian transplants into southern Ohio, Amity and Prosperity tells with vivid detail the contours of daily life in Washington and Greene counties . . . Ms. Griswold is an energetic writer, and the characters she writes about are themselves colorful, raw and dogged . . . Amity and Prosperity becomes not only a glimpse into postindustrial small towns and the environmental consequences of fracking, but also a legal thriller worthy of any novel by John Grisham. --Byron Borger, Pittsburg Post-Gazette "In her new book, Amity and Prosperity, journalist Eliza Griswold provides a deeply human counterpoint to this political fray. She takes on the decidedly fraught issue of energy extraction through a vivid, compassionate portrait of one family living in the long shadow of industry . . . Griswold chronicles these escalating horrors with disarming intimacy." --Meara Sharma, The Washington Post Powerful and deeply humane --The National Book Review Her sensitive and judicious new book, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing . . . What Griswold depicts is a community, like the earth, cracked open. . . . Parts of "Amity and Prosperity" read as intimately as a novel, though its insidious, slow-motion ordeal is all too real. --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Griswold creates a complex, elegantly written portrait of Stacey and a community ambivalent about the industry they hope can bring prosperity. --BBC "Veteran journalist Eliza Griswold's . . . Amity and Prosperity is part Erin Brockovich, part Hillbilly Elegy. You'll be inspired by [Stacey Haney, Beth Voyles and Kendra Smith] who called B.S. on what was happening around them, pointing a finger at both money-hungry businessmen and day-tripping liberals studying them like specimens. Their galvanizing activism is proof that, to help someone, first you have to listen." --Elisabeth Egan, Glamour Griswold offers a compelling portrayal of Stacey Haney and her fight . . . Memorable . . An important addition to the emerging genre of works about fracking and its environmental and human costs. This will find large audiences among concerned citizens and warrants the attention of public officials as well as fans of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. --Library Journal (Starred Review) Griswold's empathetic yet analytical account of Haney's indefatigable role as advocate for justice is a thorough and thoroughly blood-pressure-raising account of the greed and fraud embedded in the environmentally ruinous natural-gas industry. As honest and unvarnished an account of the human cost of corporate corruption as one will find. --Booklist (Starred Review) Compelling and empathetic. --Karen Olsson, Bookforum With empathy and diligence, Griswold brings attention to the emotional and financial tolls Haney and her family endured in this revealing portrait of rural America in dire straits. --Publishers Weekly