Friday, May 1, 2015

A CIVIL ACTION by Jonathan Harr

Finished Th 4/30/25

According to the flyleaf I first read and finished this book over the Thanksgiving weekend of 2003, and I only read half and skimmed to the end. This time through, it really grabbed me, and I read it all.

Anyone who is a big fan of 'Free Market Capitalism' should take a look at this book.

It's the story of Woburn, MA, a city about 20 miles to the north of Boston. Children keep coming down with leukemia, and at first nobody notices the 'disease cluster' because nobody in the scientific community really believed that there was such a thing. The families begin to communicate with each other, and it becomes clear that leukemia is running rampant in a few square blocks of the community. A tannery had been operating in the area, and it's up to these people to prove that the tanning operation was releasing toxic materials into the water supply, and that these chemicals were causing the cancer in their children.

The lawyer who championed the cause more or less lost the case. He ended up with much less of a career than he had going when he first took the case. Maybe the moral is that now the man is more fulfilled.

At the end of the book is a fairly comprehensive 'wrap-up' of the major characters in the case.

No comments:

Post a Comment