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American Fire - Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land (Hardcover)
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American Fire - Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land (Hardcover)
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The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for
months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to
see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at
first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang
up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and
camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The
arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police
were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was
desolate-there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the
dozen they were burning. The culprit, and the path that led to
these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America.
Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the
reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling
mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to
sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie's confession unspooled,
it got deeper and weirder. He wasn't lighting fires alone; his
crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of
investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his
accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like
strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on
impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each
other's inspiration and escape...until they weren't. Though it's
hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the
richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its
industry-agriculture-as well as its wealth and population. In an
already remote region, limited employment options offer little in
the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with
nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a
community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore
and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly
terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result
evokes the soul of rural America-a land half gutted before the
fires even began.
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