Eliza Griswold

Harvard Book Store and WBUR welcome award-winning translator and poet ELIZA GRISWOLD for a discussion of her latest book, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. She will be joined in conversation by award-winning journalist BRUCE GELLERMAN. This event is co-sponsored by WBUR.

About Amity and Prosperity

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.

Praise

"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." —George Packer, author of The Unwinding

"Riveting and outraging. An essential account of corporate wrongdoing, regulatory collusion, and citizen resistance in an unequal age." —Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

“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