Amity and Prosperity
by Eliza Griswold
Summary
Eliza Griswold follows Stacey Haney and her family through the years after a natural gas drilling and fracking operation arrived near their home in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, and the well water, livestock and children's health that Haney came to believe the drilling had damaged. Griswold traces the family's growing alarm as animals sickened and died, as Haney's own children developed unexplained symptoms, and as the family tried, against a well funded industry and a legal and regulatory system not built to move quickly or side easily with a single rural household, to get anyone official to take the contamination seriously.
The book follows that fight through years of testing, hired experts, and a legal battle that consumed a large part of the family's life, and Griswold uses the Haneys' specific case to show how fracking's economic promise to struggling rural communities collided with health and environmental costs that often took years to surface and even longer to prove in court. She writes without treating either side as a caricature, showing neighbors who welcomed the drilling money split against those who came to regret it, a fracture running through the same small community rather than between outside interests and a united local population.
Reading Amity and Prosperity means following one family's years long ordeal in close, patient detail, more courtroom drama and medical mystery than polemic, and it suits a reader who wants to understand fracking's human costs through a single sustained case rather than through statistics or industry claims on either side of the debate.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Eliza Griswold the 2019 Prize for General Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity, published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, calling it a classic American story, grippingly told. The finalists that year were Elizabeth Rush's Rising, on coastal communities and climate change, and Bernice Yeung's In a Day's Work, on sexual violence against low wage workers.
The Los Angeles Review of Books called the book thoroughly reported and tightly paced, and Kirkus Reviews described it as a solid addition to the growing body of writing on fracking's social and health effects. Griswold, a poet and journalist who had previously reported extensively on religion and conflict, spent years embedded with the Haney family to produce the book, and it remains one of the most closely followed narrative accounts of fracking's contested effects on a single American community.