Twilight in Hazard
An Appalachian Reckoning
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did...[Maimon] eviscerates Vance's bestseller with stiletto precision.” —Associated Press
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
