Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning by Alan Maimon (English) Paperback

Description: Twilight in Hazard by Alan Maimon From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the story of how a convergence of events at the start of the new millennium continues to impact life in the region and the soul of the nation."Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did... Maimon eviscerates Vances bestseller with stiletto precision." -Associated PressFrom 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 Timess 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, bareknuckledpolitical 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, Maimons Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. Itis both a powerful chronicle of a young reporters immersion in a place, and of his return years later-this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miners 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Alan Maimonis an award-winning journalist and author. As a reporter with theLouisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about gaping holes in Kentuckys justice system. His work for theLas Vegas Review-Journalon police shootings and the court system garnered national awards and acclaim. He started his professional writing career in the Berlin bureau ofThe New York Times. Maimon is a former Fulbright scholar, and currently lives with his family in Hopewell, New Jersey. Review "Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did...[Maimon] eviscerates Vances bestseller with stiletto precision." —Associated Press "Alan Maimons reporting on the Applachian town of Hazard, Kentucky is no sentimental or misguided elegy. It is instead a searing and revealing account of what happens when jobs disappear, institutions collapse, politicians grandstand, and the very middle of America get hollowed out by greed and indifference."— Bryant Simon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of History at Temple University and author of The Hamlet Fire "An empathic portrait of eastern Kentucky... Contending that Americans must combat the notion that people and places are irredeemable... Maimons sharp observations and personal stake in the subject make this a standout account of what ails rural America." —Publishers Weekly "Maimon writes with a journalists clarity and plainspokenness... A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents."—Kirkus "A must read for Kentuckians who love this commonwealth, and for any American who cares about this beautiful, tortured land and the people who inhabit this unique patch of earth." —Chris Helvey, The State Journal "Maimons Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning brings energy and an insight to a region that for so long has deserved so much more than a death song." Lexington Herald-Leader "Twilight in Hazard gives the great FX show Justified a run for its money, and then some. A riveting read." —Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls "Twilight in Hazard chronicles the decades of taking that Appalachia has weathered, but it also chronicles the strength and resiliency of the human spirit of those who have been left behind. This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true." —Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home "In tight, compelling prose, Twilight in Hazard takes us directly to the heart of one of Americas most serious problems: the decline of local news. This book, with its indelible sense of place, may break your heart but it may also strengthen our collective resolve to find solutions to this crisis before it is entirely too late." —Margaret Sullivan, media columnist, The Washington Post and author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy "Alan Maimon is right to make An Appalachian Reckoning the subtitle of this wise, compassionate book, where truly We gather in our memories and reckon up the cost. " —Si Kahn, civil rights, union, and community organizer, and cofounder of the Brookside Research Project, which supported striking UMWA coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky Review Quote " Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did...[Maimon] eviscerates Vances bestseller with stiletto precision." --Associated Press " Alan Maimons reporting on the Applachian town of Hazard, Kentucky is no sentimental or misguided elegy. It is instead a searing and revealing account of what happens when jobs disappear, institutions collapse, politicians grandstand, and the very middle of America get hollowed out by greed and indifference." -- Bryant Simon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of History at Temple University and author of The Hamlet Fire "An empathic portrait of eastern Kentucky... Contending that Americans must combat the notion that people and places are irredeemable... Maimons sharp observations and personal stake in the subject make this a standout account of what ails rural America." -- Publishers Weekly "Maimon writes with a journalists clarity and plainspokenness... A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents."-- Kirkus "A must read for Kentuckians who love this commonwealth, and for any American who cares about this beautiful, tortured land and the people who inhabit this unique patch of earth." -- Chris Helvey, The State Journal "Maimons Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning brings energy and an insight to a region that for so long has deserved so much more than a death song." Lexington Herald-Leader " Twilight in Hazard gives the great FX show Justified a run for its money, and then some. A riveting read." --Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls " Twilight in Hazard chronicles the decades of taking that Appalachia has weathered, but it also chronicles the strength and resiliency of the human spirit of those who have been left behind. This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true." --Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home "In tight, compelling prose, Twilight in Hazard takes us directly to the heart of one of Americas most serious problems: the decline of local news. This book, with its indelible sense of place, may break your heart but it may also strengthen our collective resolve to find solutions to this crisis before it is entirely too late." --Margaret Sullivan, media columnist, The Washington Post and author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy "Alan Maimon is right to make An Appalachian Reckoning the subtitle of this wise, compassionate book, where truly We gather in our memories and reckon up the cost. " --Si Kahn, civil rights, union, and community organizer, and cofounder of the Brookside Research Project, which supported striking UMWA coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky Excerpt from Book PREFACE By every socioeconomic measurement, the area of Eastern Kentucky that I covered for the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 2000s is Appalachia at its most compelling and extreme. I was the last major metropolitan newspaper reporter based in those coalfields, and I wanted to write this book to provide what I believe is the most complete account to date of one of the most mythologized and least understood places in the country. It took me five years of chronicling Eastern Kentucky as a reporter and another fifteen years of thinking about and returning to those stories, in my dual role as a writer and the husband of a Harlan County coal miners daughter, to understand why we still dont understand Appalachia. There was hope after the 2016 presidential election that we might be moving toward a more nuanced view of Eastern Kentucky when, for a moment in time, the countrys scholars and storytellers begrudgingly moved past looking at the region merely as an object of perverse curiosity. All of the credit for this hint of progress went to one man: Donald Trump. In the wake of Trumps improbable ascendancy to the White House, writers and commentators, almost exclusively from Blue State America, set their gaze on Appalachia to ask variations of the same question: How could you have let this happen? Forget that Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were the states that swung the election to Trump. Forget that most Eastern Kentucky counties gave previous Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney roughly the same level of support that they gave Trump. And forget that Bernie Sanders trounced Hillary Clinton by a two-to-one margin in most parts of Eastern Kentucky in the 2016 Democratic primary. The experts pronounced that Appalachia held the key to explaining Trump and Trumpism. For the first time, Appalachians and what they thought actually mattered to the country at large. Or that was the premise, at least. This wave of national interest in Eastern Kentucky was predicated on a misinterpretation of voter registration figures. It is true that registered Democrats far outnumber registered Republicans in many counties in the region, but those numbers are a vestige of mid-twentieth-century social dynamics that do not represent the political leanings of today. If reporters left their bubbles in the hopes of discovering large clusters of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, they simply went to the wrong place. Of the 206 counties nationwide that fit that description, 31 are in Iowa and 23 are in Wisconsin. Only one, Elliott County, is in Kentucky. The results there were indeed notable because Elliott County had voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the county was established in 1869. In 2020, Elliott County again came out in force for Trump, who carried every Kentucky county but two, Jefferson and Fayette. In the absence of anything more broadly applicable to a dissection of electoral politics, most of the resulting Eastern Kentucky-set stories relied on tired old tropes about alienation from government and parochial world views. Welcome to Trump Country, everyone. Nothing more to see here. Time to catch that flight back. Left unchallenged, that bogus narrative has persisted, with national publications ruminating on a "split partisan identity" in Eastern Kentucky that simply doesnt exist. Unlike after the 2016 election, no one in 2020 flocked to Eastern Kentucky seeking insight or votes. Only parts of Central Appalachia in key battleground states received any attention at all from the presidential candidates. Moon Township, Pennsylvania, became a regular campaign stop. For all the attention it was paid, Appalachian Kentucky might as well have been a region on the moon. The future of Central Appalachian coal jobs, a major theme of the 16 campaign, hardly got mentioned, mainly because Trump failed to deliver on his promise to revive the coal industry. So, instead, he tried to use Democratic opposition to fracking as a new Republican rallying point. Yet there remains an undeniable symbolism to Eastern Kentucky, and it is one that both captures and transcends the political climate of the day. But to grasp it, we need to get better at viewing the region in the framework of a larger American story about income inequality, generational poverty, and the lack of upward mobility. Only then will we start the demystification process. When I think about the things I saw and documented in Appalachian Kentucky, I realize that this small swath of America with a population of around 700,000 offers tremendous insight into who we are and what we value as a nation. You cannot tell the story of a place as complex and contradictory as Eastern Kentucky in 800- or 1,200-word chunks written in inverted pyramid style, as I was once tasked with doing. That was a whiplash-inducing and at times overwhelming assignment. Coal mining could have been its own beat. The same applies to prescription drugs, poverty, religion, and culture. This book is my attempt to pull all of the strands together, to journey beyond the hundreds of newspaper bylines I accumulated, to capture the essence of a place that I observed for years and continue to revisit and reevaluate. The major events I chronicled for the Courier-Journal frame the narrative, but it is the material that didnt make it into the paper that I believe makes this more than just another crack at explaining Appalachia. The book examines the economic and social experiment that created the power structure of modern-day Eastern Kentucky, a proxy for struggling regions everywhere, and traces how the dramatic events of the early years of this century impacted the region and influenced the soul of the nation as a whole. It also highlights the essential role of the journalist in writing the first rough drafts of history, especially now that newspapers have left Eastern Kentucky and places like it, leaving no one to tell some very essential stories. The result is a story about drug epidemics, political violence, environmental degradation, and morality debates, but also about a seemingly laid-back rural culture where a large segment of the population is clinically depressed, about an area of natural beauty where the land has been stripped and the forests torched for amusement, and about a defining push and pull between fierce pride and a nagging sense of inferiority. Ultimately it is a story about how America and its institutions have failed Eastern Kentucky, but for better and for worse, how the people of the region have remained loyal to their idea of Americanism. INTRODUCTION Do Us Right In the fall of 2000, I had a decision to make: stay in Europe, where I had been working and living since graduating from college five years earlier, or put an end to my overseas adventure and move back to the United States to continue my burgeoning journalism career. I had a job as the news assistant in The New York Times s Berlin bureau where, between making coffee runs and trips to the post office for the bureau chief, I had managed to carve out a niche for myself as a reporter, mostly covering the European sports scene. Eventually I moved on to weightier subject matter, including a story about the shattered lives of female swimmers in East Germany who were force-fed a daily regimen of steroids as young girls and sent out to compete in championship meets. The sources I developed while writing a number of smaller pieces on the subject helped me build rapport with these former athletes. I was proud of the story. I felt it mattered. And I wanted to do more like it. But after half a decade in Europe, I felt on the brink of becoming an "expat," that breed of individual who achieves an advanced level of comfort abroad and starts to question the virtues of returning home. The year 2000 seemed as favorable a time as any to start a new chapter. Earlier that year, I had declined admission to an international studies program at Georgetown. The thought of sitting in a classroom for two years didnt appeal to me. Relocating to my native Philadelphia or another East Coast city also didnt grab me. The editors I worked with at the Times felt I could use more seasoning, and a job at a different big-city newspaper would have likely meant a few years of dues-paying on the suburban desk covering zoning and school board meetings--not a bad gig, but not the kind of beat that excited me. Based on a somewhat vague notion, I came to the conclusion that my transition to life back in the United States would go more smoothly if I went to a place where I had no connections or familiarity, where the newness would challenge and consume me. If possible, I wanted to work in a region that would feel as foreign to me as a different country. It wasnt long after I formulated that idea that I ran across an ad for an opening in the Louisville Courier-Journal s Eastern Kentucky bureau. Based in the town of Hazard, it seemed to fit the bill. I read up a bit on the Courier-Journal and learned that the Hazard office had recently been vacated by a reporter who won a prestigious national award for a series called Dust, Deception and Death about coal mining industry manipulation of coal-dust tests in underground mines. That was the high-impact type of project I wanted to work on. Up until that point, I dont think that I had ever really known anyone from Appalachian Kentucky. On family car trips in my youth, we had nipped the corners of West Virginia and passed through some of the other more well-traveled parts of the region, but East Details ISBN1612199976 Short Title Twilight in Hazard Pages 304 Publisher Melville House Publishing Language English Year 2022 ISBN-10 1612199976 ISBN-13 9781612199979 Format Paperback Publication Date 2022-07-05 Subtitle An Appalachian Reckoning Imprint Melville House Publishing Place of Publication Brooklyn Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2022-07-05 NZ Release Date 2022-07-05 US Release Date 2022-07-05 UK Release Date 2022-07-05 Author Alan Maimon Illustrator Gladys Jose Birth 1927 Death 1855 Affiliation Clark University Position journalist Qualifications M.D. DEWEY 976.9173 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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