****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I was slow to pick this one up after it won the Pulitzer because I was worried the subject, fracking, would be too technical and frankly, grim. It *is* a serious book, rigorously reported, but I needn't have worried, given Eliza Griswold's gifts as a writer and reporter. This is narrative nonfiction at its best, rich in character, place and social and political context. AMITY AND PROSPERITY has the plot propulsion of an environmental thriller---imagine a nonfiction Barbara Kingsolver novel, though more deeply layered, the characters more complex, and the reality ultimately enraging.At the heart of the story is Stacey Haney, a mother who slowly realizes her children are being poisoned by her neighbor's open frack pond up her rural country road. (I didn't know we had ponds with open frack waste in residential neighborhoods, much less ones lined with a thin layer of tarp, and that's just one of the many horrors Haney confronts and Griswold reveals.) Stacey is in disbelief because she's not inclined to think that the government and her longtime neighbors would so blithely put her and her family at risk and when confronted, would so blatantly lie to her, at her and her children's peril. What Griswold does so beautiful is recreate the growing horror and impossible choices Stacey and her family face while never losing sight of the context: willful corporate greed and governmental complicity. Griswold builds such an airtight case that it's impossible to read this book and not feel compassion, rage and fear about what may come next in a country where we are so desperate for cheap fuel and so reluctant to regulate how we extract it.
