Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.97 (748 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1610915917 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 576 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-01-31 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
It's Personal Stephen M. DeBock For nearly seven years, I worked as a lab technician at the Toms River Chemical Corporation. I remember the initial economic benefit the dye-and-plastics manufacturing plant brought to the community and its philanthropic projects designed to ingratiate it with the population. I remember endorsing the company's effluent pipeline and its alleged efforts to be a good neighbor. That was then. Before the knowledge became public that the plant's Swiss masters were following a time-dishonored tradition: from originally polluting the Rhine River, next to polluting the Ohio River, and finally to polluting . Excellently written and well balanced Miranda When I received this book I was not in the mood to read about chemical companies' complete disregard for anything but profits or pollution or cancer. However, it immediately drew me in and I read 134 pages in the first sitting. I've also been compelled to tell everyone I'm in contact with about it.Fagin's writing and structuring is particularly effective in keeping the book lively and interesting and preventing it from becoming overwhelming. He shifts between the specific history of Toms River, of the plant, its employees, and the citizens, and the history of industrial waste disposal, environment. Not Snookie's Jersey shore: three generations of chemistry, greed and environmental politics Long-Suffering Technology Consumer When I was in high school, my family lived less than 10 miles from the New Jersey title city of this book. In those days, the landscape of that part of Ocean County was not yet populated with the McMansions of New York and Philadelphia commuters. In addition to the stunted pines and pin oaks that mark the Pine Barrens, the area was dominated by the remnants of closed post-WWII poultry farms, some cranberry bogs, gravel pits and horse farmsand not much else. When we roamed the mostly unfenced woodlands between roads often named for mills and creeks, it was not unusual to come across 55-gallon drums
Former Newsday environmental journalist Fagin’s work may not be quite as riveting in its particulars as Skloot’s book, but it features jaw-dropping accounts of senseless waste-disposal practices set against the inspiring saga of the families who stood up to the enormous Toms River chemical plant. From Booklist What was in the water in Toms River? A seemingly high number of childhood cancer cases in the New Jersey town prompted the question, but there turned out to be no easy answer. --Bridget Thoreson . The book goes beyond the Toms River phenomenon itself to examine the many factors that came together in that one spot, from the birth of the synthetic chemical industry to the evolution of epidemiology to the physicians who invented occupational medicine. As Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) investigated the tragic impact that unethical scientific pursuits had on a family, Toms River unravels the careless environmental practices that da
One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of the largest environmental legal settlements in history. He brings to life the pioneering scientists and physicians who first identified pollutants as a cause of cancer and the everyday people in Toms River who struggled for justice: a young boy whose cherubic smile belied the fast-growing tumors that had decimated his body from birth; a nurse who fought to bring the alarming incidence of childhood cancers to the attention of authorities who didn’t want to listen; and a mother whose love for her stricken child transformed her into a tenacious advocate for change. The true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, Toms River won th