Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold - ISBN: 9781472268723
Paperback
Fracking boom sickness sparks a mother’s fight for justice.

Amity and Prosperity

One Family and the Fracturing of America - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 2019

  • Paperback

    336 pages

  • Release Date

    10 June 2019

Summary

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Seven years in the making, AMITY AND PROSPERITY tells the story of the energy boom’s impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of 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 rep…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781472268723
ISBN-10:1472268725
Author:Eliza Griswold
Publisher:Headline Publishing Group
Imprint:Wildfire
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:336
Release Date:10 June 2019
Weight:240g
Dimensions:196mm x 128mm x 28mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

A morally complex and beautifully-written story of Appalachia, of family, of resources we all use. It’s about what binds and tears apart a community and a country

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 - The New York Times Book Review

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 - The New York Times

A morally complex and beautifully-written story of Appalachia, of family, of resources we all use. It’s about what binds and tears apart a community and a country. - author of The Unwinding, Winner of the National Book Award

Riveting and outraging. An essential account of corporate wrongdoing, regulatory collusion and citizen resistance in an unequal age - author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Winner of the National Book Award

Expertly constructed … [Griswold’s] 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 … Thoroughly reported and tightly paced, Amity and Prosperity is an essential document of the region’s latest go-round with the riches underfoot - Los Angeles Review of Books

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 - Glamour

Griswold creates a complex, elegantly written portrait of Stacey and a community ambivalent about the industry they hope can bring prosperity - BBC

About The Author

Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold has written and translated five books of nonfiction and poetry, and Circle of Hope was named as a 2024 finalist for the National Book Award. Griswold was also awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and Critics’ Pick. Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others. She has been awarded various prizes, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. She directs the Journalism Program at Princeton University.

Returns

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.