Bilott’s admirable crusade is widely known thanks to coverage by journalists; this book adds plenty of detail and further...
An environmental lawyer recounts the two-decade-long saga of U.S. residents being poisoned by drinking water contaminated with toxic chemicals used in the production of Teflon.
A young corporate attorney in Cincinnati as the narrative opens in 1996, Bilott explains his progression from defending corporate polluters to advocating for plaintiffs being denied justice by the multinational chemical manufacturer DuPont. Although the narrative eventually becomes dominated by arcane legal procedures and complicated chemistry, it opens powerfully as Bilott receives an unusual telephone call from Earl Tennant, a farmer on a modest acreage near Parkersburg, West Virginia. Tennant understood implicitly that some toxic substance was killing his cows and causing illness in his family, but nobody in West Virginia would listen, including the state environmental protection agency. Tennant was acquainted with Bilott’s grandmother, who provided him with the author’s phone number in Cincinnati. Though Bilott felt he could not accept Tennant as a client, for a multitude of reasons, he met with him at the farm, immediately sensed an injustice, and risked his career at his law firm to represent the Tennant family. Eventually, that one case mushroomed into a class-action lawsuit on behalf of tens of thousands of plaintiffs harmed by the toxic discharges emanating from DuPont’s factory. Bilott is obviously an advocate, so his treatment of DuPont’s scientists, lawyers, and top executives should be read with caution. Still, his level of detail leaves little doubt that year after year, the corporation misled government agencies, courts, and consumers into a false sense of security about the poisonous nature of their manufacturing processes. Bilott shares candid details about his own insecurities within his law firm as well as his failures as a husband and a father stemming from his workaholic nature.
Bilott’s admirable crusade is widely known thanks to coverage by journalists; this book adds plenty of detail and further context.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7281-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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