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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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