Amity and prosperity One family and the fracturing of America

AMITY AND PROSPERITY: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold. (Picador, $18.) This exhaustively researched account traces the devastating effects of fracking on a Pennsylvania town: illnesses, toxic waste, a collapsing middle class. The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year, captures the layers of government malfeasance and neglect that allowed a corporation's interests to win out in the region. THE GREAT BELIEVERS, by Rebecca Makkai. (Penguin, $16.) Makkai's powerful novel chronicles the AIDS epidemic, from its outbreak up to the present day, through the lives of a group of friends in Chicago, most of them gay men. Along the way, the story of a woman searching for her daughter in Paris in 2015 is woven in. The book was one of the Book Review's 10 best of 2018. FRENEMIES: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else), by Ken Auletta. (Penguin, $17.) The media reporter and best-selling author describes the new landscape for advertising and marketing, both competing with and dependent on Silicon Valley. Though America's fascination with advertising has dimmed, Auletta does point to successful innovations, even as the industry stares down existential threats. OHIO, by Stephen Markley. (Simon & Schuster, $16.99.) In this timely debut novel, which touches on everything from the Iraq war to opiate addiction to the alt-right, a group of former classmates return to their Rust Belt hometown, where an astonishing number of secrets and betrayals are revealed. As our reviewer, Dan Chaon, put it, "The real core of this earnestly ambitious debut lies not in its sweeping statements but in its smaller moments, in its respectful and bighearted renderings of damaged and thwarted lives." THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A Memoir in DeathDefying Acts, by Tessa Fontaine. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) After her mother suffered a terrible stroke, leaving her severely incapacitated, the author ran off to join the circus, where she ate fire, handled a boa constrictor and even swallowed swords. Fontaine braids these experiences, of losing her mother and performing in a sideshow, into an elegant narrative. THE MARS ROOM, by Rachel Kushner. (Scribner, $17.) Set in a women's correctional facility, this propulsive novel reveals an imagination that is Dickensian in its range and its reformist zeal. As our reviewer, Charles McGrath, wrote, "Kushner's novel is so powerful and realistic you come away convinced that... even for those who get out, prison is still a life sentence."

*Starred Review* The names Amity and Prosperity conjure up images of tranquility and abundance, and, indeed, historically, the good life was found within these southwestern Pennsylvania towns. Where once coal was king, now hydraulic fracking rules the day, with mining companies competing for rights to drill into the Marcellus Shale's abundant natural-gas reserves. Along with other landowners, single-mother Stacey Haney wrestled with her conscience before signing a lease with Range Resources to drill on her land. She was working multiple jobs to raise two teens and running a farm on her own, so the promised windfall would have been welcome. But when her son manifests a series of inexplicable ailments and farm animals unexpectedly die, Haney painstakingly traces the source of the illnesses back to the water and air pollution generated by the fracking sites. Stonewalled by the mining company, shunned by her community, Haney only finds hope and help with a husband-and-wife legal team willing to take on this powerful adversary. Griswold's (The Tenth Parallel, 2010) empathetic yet analytical account of Haney's indefatigable role as advocate for justice is a thorough and thoroughly blood-pressure-­raising account of the greed and fraud embedded in the environmentally ruinous natural-gas industry. As honest and unvarnished an account of the human cost of corporate corruption as one will find.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

Journalist Griswold (The Tenth Parallel) comprehensively examines the circumstances surrounding the lawsuit that Stacey Haney, a nurse and single mother, filed against energy company Range Resources. The book opens with an account of the shale gas boom of the mid-2000s, when fracking (hydraulic fracturing) brought unexpected windfalls to financially distressed towns on the border of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, including Haney's hometown, Amity, and the neighboring town of Prosperity in rural Pennsylvania. Residents welcomed the money from mineral leases, using it to pay for needed roofs and fences. Haney did, too, until her son, Hartley, was hospitalized for fatigue and tested positive for high levels of arsenic in his blood, which they believed was due to runoff from the fracking on a nearby property. When Haney and her daughter, Paige, got tested, they too were diagnosed with arsenic poisoning. The community reacted to the news and Haney's subsequent lawsuit with suspicion and animosity, accusing Haney of "acting out of hysteria." Griswold combines Haney's perspective with those of her attorneys, John Smith and Kendra Smith, during the years-long legal saga, which was settled for an undisclosed amount in early 2018. With empathy and diligence, Griswold brings attention to the emotional and financial tolls Haney and her family endured in this revealing portrait of rural America in dire straits. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.