What We Are Reading Today: Amity and Prosperity, by Eliza Griswold

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight.
The author presents her information in a very unbiased way, letting her readers make their own opinion regarding a very controversial issue.
Griswold paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.
A review in the New York Times said: “The broad political costs of fracking are not expressly Griswold’s subject, however. Her impressive research notwithstanding, Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending.”
It added: “Considering the animus and hardship described in this book, the title sounds almost cruelly ironic, but it comes from the land itself. Amity and Prosperity are the names of two towns in Pennsylvania’s Washington County.”