$22.49
Author: Griswold Eliza
Brand: Picador USA
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Pages: 336
Details: About the Author
Eliza Griswold, a Guggenheim fellow, is the author of a collection of poems, Wideawake Field (FSG, 2007) and a nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (FSG, 2010), a New York Times bestseller that was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She has worked with Seamus Murphy in Africa and Asia for more than a decade. She lives in New York City.
Product Description
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
In Amity and Prosperity, the prizewinning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold tells the story of the energy boom’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist.
Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbors’ mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company. Soon trucks begin rumbling past her small farm, a fenced-off drill site rises on an adjacent hilltop, and domestic animals and pets start to die. When mysterious sicknesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong.
Alarmed by her children’s illnesses, Haney joins with neighbors and a committed husband-and-wife legal team to investigate what’s really in the water and air. Against local opposition, Haney and her allies doggedly pursue their case in court and begin to expose the damage that’s being done to the land her family has lived on for centuries. Soon a community that has long been suspicious of outsiders faces wrenching new questions about who is responsible for their fate, and for redressing it: The faceless corporations that are poisoning the land? The environmentalists who fail to see their economic distress? A federal government that is mandated to protect but fails on the job? Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, Griswold reveals what happens when an imperiled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice.
Review
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 Pros
Release Date: 04-06-2019
Package Dimensions: 25x208x272
