3 of 6 copies available
From 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.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
June 8, 2021 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781612198866
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781612198866
- File size: 979 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
March 1, 2021
A former eastern Kentucky journalist clarifies (and debunks) some well-worn tropes about Appalachia. From 2000 to 2005, Maimon was a Pulitzer-finalist correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, which gave him a front-row seat to the accelerating decline in and around the hamlet of Hazard, Kentucky. The opiate crisis, stoked by rampant and unregulated "pill mills," was expanding, and the coal industry that supported much of the region was in rapid decline. The author contextualizes those dual catastrophes around a place that has been historically deeply poor and plagued by leadership that has been either corrupt or dismissive of long-term, systemic improvements. "Almost every topic I wrote about in Eastern Kentucky connected back to economic marginalization in some way," he writes. Much of the book focuses on stories he covered during his stint at the paper--e.g., the murders of two candidates for sheriff in 2002 and the case of lawyer Eric Conn, who was convicted of hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security fraud for helping residents get benefits for "bad nerves." (The resulting crackdown led to a rash of suicides, only exacerbating the problem.) But Maimon also brings the story up to date. He underscores the hollowness of Trump's promises to bring back coal jobs and how much partisan politics have stymied halting efforts at progress. Maimon writes with a journalist's clarity and plainspokenness; he's an outsider but never condescending, and he's accepting that some of the truisms about the region are indeed true. He closes on a skeptical note: Open-minded leaders still have a hard time getting traction there, and Trumpism has set its claws, a mindset exemplified by a popular wrestler called the Progressive Liberal, who attracts jeers when he hits the stage talking about the Green New Deal. A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-
April 5, 2021
Journalist Maimon (Hits and Misses in the Baseball Draft) delivers an empathetic portrait of eastern Kentucky informed by the five years (from 2000 to 2005) he spent in the poverty-stricken region as a “foreign correspondent” for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Among other noteworthy news events, Maimon documents the explosion of the opioid epidemic, the decline of the coal mining industry, and legal battles fought between the ACLU and conservative legal groups over the display of biblical texts in eastern Kentucky schools and government offices. Contending that Americans must “combat the notion that people and places are irredeemable,” Maimon highlights his experiences getting to know the people of the area, including a gregarious small town mayor and a group of pumped-up evangelical Christians on their way to a Billy Graham crusade. He also offers behind-the-scenes details about the Courier-Journal’s struggles to survive in the internet era, and makes clear how difficult the “shrinking” of coverage, as well as page size, were for journalists and readers alike. Throughout, Maimon’s hope for the region is tempered by an awareness of how difficult it will be to defeat “the historical and structural forces that keep people in poverty.” Though the overarching themes are familiar, Maimon’s sharp observations and personal stake in the subject make this a standout account of what ails rural America.
-