Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Overview

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold's Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - JoAnn Wypijewski

[Griswold's] impressive research notwithstanding, Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: a bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals…tough, reluctant victim-heroes; grisly scenes of animal die-off; and courtroom drama…People who've lost their water to fracking, like those who live in impoverished, toxified communities everywhere…are on a continuum that began with the indigenous peoples, the enslaved Africans and the "waste people" ("refuse," as Benjamin Franklin called poor Pennsylvanians), who were forced off the land, into bondage or penury at America's dawn. The nature of oppression changes, but the levers of power that have helped some to prosper while allowing many to sink are hardened in place, and the persistent question, implicit in this valuable, discomforting book, is Who will unstick them?

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

[Griswold's] sensitive and judicious new book…is neither an outraged sermon delivered from a populist soapbox nor a pinched, professorial lecture. Griswold…paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing…The people there are no strangers to industry, including its boons and disasters. Coal, steel and now natural gas: To suggest that the county's residents have just been bamboozled by greedy industry sounds to them like the bleating of condescending elites and, for a number of locals, simply untrue. Some families have suffered while others have thrived. 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.

Publishers Weekly

05/14/2018
Journalist Griswold (The Tenth Parallel) comprehensively examines the circumstances surrounding the lawsuit that Stacey Haney, a nurse and single mother, filed against energy company Range Resources. The book opens with an account of the shale gas boom of the mid-2000s, when fracking (hydraulic fracturing) brought unexpected windfalls to financially distressed towns on the border of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, including Haney’s hometown, Amity, and the neighboring town of Prosperity in rural Pennsylvania. Residents welcomed the money from mineral leases, using it to pay for needed roofs and fences. Haney did, too, until her son, Hartley, was hospitalized for fatigue and tested positive for high levels of arsenic in his blood, which they believed was due to runoff from the fracking on a nearby property. When Haney and her daughter, Paige, got tested, they too were diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. The community reacted to the news and Haney’s subsequent lawsuit with suspicion and animosity, accusing Haney of “acting out of hysteria.” Griswold combines Haney’s perspective with those of her attorneys, John Smith and Kendra Smith, during the years-long legal saga, which was settled for an undisclosed amount in early 2018. 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. (June)

From the Publisher

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

Kirkus Reviews

2018-04-11
Griswold (The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, 2010, etc.) immerses herself with a few Pennsylvania families in rural areas near Pittsburgh to chronicle their life-threatening battles against the fracking industry.To extract natural gas deposits from deep within the ground, giant energy companies employ processes and chemicals that can disseminate dangerous substances into drinking water sources and into the air. The author, an extraordinarily versatile wordsmith as a poet, translator, and journalist, visited a region of Pennsylvania that had become a fracking crossroads. At a meeting of concerned citizens receiving payments for fracking on their land but angry about unforeseen environmental degradation, Griswold met Stacey Haney. A lifelong citizen of Amity—near the nearly depopulated town of Prosperity—Haney, a nurse, has been worried that harmful elements from the fracking process have yielded chronic illnesses in herself and her children. Neither Haney nor most of her neighbors wanted to become social activists (many of them usually vote Republican and support Donald Trump). However, the increasing financial debt of the citizens from both towns, combined with the puzzling chronic ailments, led them to hire a team of lawyers to craft a court challenge or at least force the state's environmental protection agency to halt fracking operations of for-profit corporations. Because no scientific consensus has emerged about the societal benefits versus the public health hazards of fracking, the Haneys, as well as the other plaintiffs, worry that they will never prevail on technical grounds. Surprisingly, several Pennsylvania courts ruled against the fracking industry, but the Haneys and other plaintiffs received little in the way of tangible benefits. As the author inserts herself into the narrative about one-third of the way through, she becomes a character with apparent sympathies for the individual plaintiffs and their hardworking lawyers, but her reporting is, for the most part, evenhanded.A solid addition to the burgeoning literature on the social and health-related effects of fracking.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172097720
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,199,186

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