TWILIGHT IN HAZARD

A former eastern Kentucky journalist clarifies (and debunks) some well-worn tropes about Appalachia.

From 2000 to 2005, Maimon was a Pulitzer-finalist correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, which gave him a front-row seat to the accelerating decline in and around the hamlet of Hazard, Kentucky. The opiate crisis, stoked by rampant and unregulated “pill mills,” was expanding, and the coal industry that supported much of the region was in rapid decline. The author contextualizes those dual catastrophes around a place that has been historically deeply poor and plagued by leadership that has been either corrupt or dismissive of long-term, systemic improvements. “Almost every topic I wrote about in Eastern Kentucky connected back to economic marginalization in some way,” he writes. Much of the book focuses on stories he covered during his stint at the paper—e.g., the murders of two candidates for sheriff in 2002 and the case of lawyer Eric Conn, who was convicted of hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security fraud for helping residents get benefits for “bad nerves.” (The resulting crackdown led to a rash of suicides, only exacerbating the problem.) But Maimon also brings the story up to date. He underscores the hollowness of Trump’s promises to bring back coal jobs and how much partisan politics have stymied halting efforts at progress. Maimon writes with a journalist’s clarity and plainspokenness; he’s an outsider but never condescending, and he’s accepting that some of the truisms about the region are indeed true. He closes on a skeptical note: Open-minded leaders still have a hard time getting traction there, and Trumpism has set its claws, a mindset exemplified by a popular wrestler called the Progressive Liberal, who attracts jeers when he hits the stage talking about the Green New Deal.

A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.