Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning by Alan Maimon

What a pleasant surprise. That title, let alone the sub-title, conjures up images of a polemic that disparages a county-seat Eastern Kentucky town and smugly settles on a prediction of a future of doom and despair. The Preface begins the author’s attempt to set the record straight by objecting to the 2016 flurry of stories about Appalachia as the essence of Trump Country.  The author, Alan Maimon, arrived in Hazard, Kentucky, as the Louisville Courier Journal’s Eastern Kentucky reporter in 2000 fresh from a New York Times assignment in Berlin. Slowly he began to appreciate more and more that the forces that exploited and helped define Eastern Kentucky were quintessentially American forces. Later he married an Eastern Kentucky woman, although they now live in New Jersey. Yes, this news-rich and commentary-laden memoir does not shy away from dastardly and violent local politicians, but it does lay the region’s problems squarely on the laps of the pharmaceutical and non-renewable energy g