This was excellent. Horrifying, desperately frustrating, but excellent nonetheless, and a perfect illustration of why business should never be left to police itself. An extraordinarily weak-minded regulatory community, when meeting a company comprised of people with extraordinarily weak morals and extraordinary levels of greed, can only result in a disaster like this. Ciba Chemicals can argue until it's blue in the face that they should be able to dump toxic waste wherever they like, but when they're hiding what they do, burying reports that they don't like, and knowingly exposing their workers and community and environment to such horrible risk they lack all credibility and, frankly, all decent human feeling. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and to be so consistently shady... is shady on a whole other level.

I'm honestly not sure what's worse. That they did all this, knowing that if they were caught the fines were so minimal that waste dumping was worth it, or that when they could no longer get away with dumping and water poisoning in Toms River they basically said, "Oh well, onto the next exploitable community" and moved to places even poorer and less regulated than New Jersey. Which strategy, incidentally, was the reason they ended up manufacturing in Toms River in the first place - they'd essentially been kicked out of their previous manufacturing sites, or had found it unprofitable to up their game to meet newly imposed standards at those sites, and so just packed up to pollute elsewhere. For no better reason than money, of course. All the times, reading this book, that they put off installing things like water filters because it would have cost them a fraction of their yearly profit - of their monthly profit! - are just sickening. And the local politicians and community members and every possible oversight board that looked away, again and again... I said it before, it's enormously frustrating watching these fuckers slither away time after time with little more than a slap on the wrist. I'd like to think that if they'd known the cancer they'd end up causing the local children they'd have done differently, but the truth is they'd probably just have tried harder to hide it. They certainly didn't do much to protect their own workers from bladder cancer, by all accounts... perhaps if those workers were smaller and cuter Ciba would have shifted more often, in order to shift blame a bit faster.

All credit to Fagin here, he's done a marvelous job stitching this all together, making a welter of detail both clear and understandable, and turning a story of industrial pollution and child cancer into an extremely compelling narrative. If only all non-fiction were this well-written! And if only this one had never needed to be written...