Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning

Synopsis

&“This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true.&” —Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than HomeFrom investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation . . . When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region &“like a foreign correspondent would.&” And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times&’s Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic—a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day. While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckled political rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everything—and nothing—you have heard about the region is true. And far from being a foreign place, it is a region whose generations-long struggles are driven by quintessentially American forces. Resisting the easy cliches, Maimon&’s Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. It is both a powerful chronicle of a young reporter&’s immersion in a place, and of his return years later—this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner&’s daughter—to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology. Twilight in Hazard refuses to mythologize Central Appalachia. It is a plea to move past the fixation on coal, and a reminder of the true costs to democracy when the media retreats from places of rural distress. It is an intimate portrait of a people staring down some of the most pernicious forces at work in America today while simultaneously being asked: How could you let this happen to yourselves? Twilight in Hazard instead tells the more riveting, noirish, and sometimes bitingly humorous story of how we all let this happen.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781612198866

Related ISBNs:

9781612198859

Publisher:

Melville House

Date of Addition:

06/08/21

Copyrighted By:

Alan Maimon

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.