Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning

Alan Maimon

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SKU: 9781612199979
Regular price $17.99
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"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.

Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Published: 07/05/2022
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.8lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781612199979

About the Author
Alan Maimon is an award-winning journalist and author. As a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about gaping holes in Kentucky's justice system. His work for the Las Vegas Review-Journal on police shootings and the court system garnered national awards and acclaim. He started his professional writing career in the Berlin bureau of The New York Times. Maimon is a former Fulbright scholar, and currently lives with his family in Hopewell, New Jersey.