A rigorous accounting of a remarkably hard-fought battle for clean water.
One lawyer’s grinding, seven-year effort to extract justice for residents of an Appalachian mining region.
In 2004, a New Orleans lawyer named Kevin Thompson had scored some successes against polluting corporations when he took on the cases of the “Forgotten Communities” of southern West Virginia. Over decades, the residents’ water had been undrinkable and poisonous; they reported disproportionate cases of kidney stones, diarrhea, and cancer. The obvious culprit seemed to be Rawl Sales, a coal-processing company that had been dumping toxic slurry into abandoned mines that then leached into groundwater. The trick was to prove it—and to do it against the army of well-paid and patient lawyers pitted against Thompson. As Maher, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, makes clear, Thompson was battling not just a company, but an all-pervasive culture that treated mining as sacred. The region's godlike figure was Don Blankenship, head of Rawl Sales' parent company, Massey Energy. He prided himself on living next to his coal workers, but his own gated home, dubbed Crystal Acres, was served by a water line that didn’t branch out to other residents, and he was overly cozy with a state Supreme Court justice. Maher is fastidious with the facts and careful not to oversell Thompson-vs.-Blankenship as a simplistic David-and-Goliath tale. The economics of West Virginia are more complicated than that, and many of Thompson’s victories were Pyrrhic. Even though the text is dense with legal motions and depositions, the author maintains forward momentum and nicely balances case details with more intimate portraits of Thompson, who neared financial ruin over the seven years he pursued Massey; area residents; and Blankenship, who disgraced himself in 2010 when one of his mines exploded, killing 29 workers. It’s both a case study in exploitation of the little guy and a playbook for confronting it.
A rigorous accounting of a remarkably hard-fought battle for clean water.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8734-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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