Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America is a non-fiction book written by Eliza Griswold and published in 2018. It examines the social, environmental, and economic impact of the natural gas fracking industry on a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The book primarily focuses on the Hane family, particularly Stacey Haney and her children, as they deal with the consequences of fracking in their community. Griswold provides an intimate and in-depth look at how fracking operations affect the lives of ordinary people, from water contamination to health problems and legal battles. She also explores the broader implications of fracking on rural America, the environment, and the energy industry.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction [1] in 2019. The jury described the book as "a classic American story" and praised it as being "grippingly told". [1]
According to Book Marks, the book received a positive reception. [2] The Los Angeles Review of Books called the work "thoroughly reported and tightly paced". [3] A Kirkus review concluded that the work was a "solid addition to the burgeoning literature on the social and health-related effects of fracking." [4] The book was also reviewed in The New York Times [5] and The Nation. [6]
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles area city of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper in the nation and the largest in the Western United States with a print circulation of 118,760. It has 500,000 online subscribers, the fifth-largest among U.S. newspapers. Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won over 40 Pulitzer Prizes since its founding.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. She is the author of nine novels and a collection of essays. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International Dublin IMPAC Award and The Orange Prize. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Absolution was awarded the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles author, novelist, and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America, Latino immigrants, and the United States. In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
The Ridenhour Prizes are awards in four categories given annually in recognition of those "who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society".
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019, and which was a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics' Pick. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Gasland is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Josh Fox. It focuses on communities in the United States where natural gas drilling activity was a concern and, specifically, on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a method of stimulating production in otherwise impermeable rock. The film was a key mobilizer for the anti-fracking movement, and "brought the term 'hydraulic fracturing' into the nation's living rooms" according to The New York Times.
Josh Fox is an American film director, playwright and environmental activist, best known for his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 2010 documentary, Gasland. He is the founder and artistic director of a film and theater company in New York City, International WOW, and has contributed as a journalist to Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, NowThis, AJ+ and Huffington Post.
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a nonfiction book about the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 and details not only the events of the week-long uprising and its brutal ending, but also the protracted legal battles that persisted for decades after the event. It is the third book by University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson. Blood in the Water provides a complete history of the incidents at Attica reflecting a decade of research, including information from interviews, government records, personal correspondence, and legal documents, much of which has never been made public before. Thompson argues that the Attica uprising and New York state's response represented shifting American approaches to incarceration and policy. The reverberations of this watershed event has continued to influence America's prison system.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a South Vietnamese-born American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Ty McCormick is an American author, foreign correspondent, and magazine editor. He is currently a senior editor of Foreign Affairs, the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2015 to 2018, he was the Africa editor at Foreign Policy magazine. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.
Julia Angwin is an American investigative journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She co-founded and was editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology on society. She was a staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013, during which time she was on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She worked as a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2014 to April 2018, during which time she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Public Herald is a non-profit investigative news organization based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Launched in 2011 by Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman, Public Herald is known for their investigative reporting on fracking activity and its effect on water in Pennsylvania. Their slogan is, "media by and for the public interests."
Mark Stevens is an American writer who was co-awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography with Annalyn Swan for De Kooning: An American Master. His book with Swan also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 2004 and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2005. During his writing career, Stevens was an art critic for Newsweek, The New Republic and New York between the 1970s to 2000s. Other publications by Stevens include a 1981 work on Richard Diebenkorn's art and a 1984 book called Summer of the City.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African American abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight and published by Simon & Schuster. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X is a biography of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne. The book was published in September 29, 2020 by Liveright in hardcover format while an audiobook, narrated by actor Dion Graham, was simultaneously released by Recorded Books. Among other honors, the book won the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City is a book written by Andrea Elliott.
Wednesday's Child is a 2023 short story collection by Chinese writer Yiyun Li, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It includes 11 stories Li had written over the course of 14 years, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Esquire. The book was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.