Rating: 
Summary: A superb true-life legal thriller.
Review: Having lived in Boston during the 80's, with a relative who worked for one of the defending law firms and lots of friends who worked for a business that overlooked the toxic waste site at the heart of the drama, I was predisposed to be absorbed by this book about a David and Goliath lawsuit. Curiously, as I started reading it, I wondered why I couldn't remember how the lawsuit ended from the contemporary newspaper accounts. Personal connections proved irrelevant, and the reasons for my memory lapse became clear as the book unfolded. It is as riveting as the best fiction, as perfectly tailored as a fine suit, and it manages to arouse every kind of emotion as it takes you on a breathtaking roller-coaster ride from indignation to triumph to despair. Mesmerizing and educational
Rating:
Summary: Justice? Laugh when you say that.
Review: You'll never drink water again
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating and well written account with a sad ending.
Review: The prose sparkles. Words jump off the page. The
writer skillfully draws you into the story by almost anticipating your questions with answers furnished just as soon as the questions come up. However, as in real life, the ending is somewhat inconclusive and seems to leave the reader hanging. Is the judge corrupt? Is there a conspiracy? None of these questions was answered to my entire satisfaction. Also, after rooting for this young attorney for the better
part of five hundred pages, the fact that in the end he
wound up declaring personal bankruptcy, getting out of
the practice of law, and going off to Hawaii to become a beach bum, left me with a very let down feeling. Still, for approximately the three days that it took me
to read this book, I was the lawyer. Very fine writing, but unfortunately the outcome was less than satisfying, through
no fault of the writer, who hung out with the plaintiffs
for about eight long years, through all their trials and
tribulations.
Ultimately, it raises one serious question: is there
no justice in this country? Kind of like the O.J. Simpson
verdict. Is this dejavu all over again?
Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK
Review: This is one of the most amazing books I've ever read
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary book
Review: The other reviewers above have it exactly right: this is an incredible book: illuminating, maddening, engaging. It's perhaps the best book I've read in the past several yars -- and I read maybe 100 books a year. It's really that good
Rating:
Summary: Justice?
Review: This book is a depressing lesson in the ways that our judicial system don't work. An adverserial system of justice, by its very nature, leads not to an inquiry into the truth but instead to a polarized system where each side is fighting for its own side and disinterested in the merits of its opposition.While this book was, in many ways, a real downer, it was also a fascinating chronicle of litigation. I was immediately drawn in my the families' tragedies, Schlichtmann's flawed but good-hearted optimism, and the interaction between the lawyers and the judge. As Schlichtmann swirled deeper into debt, I found it impossible not to feel a growing sense of desparation along with him. The ending is bitterly disappointing, but in many ways the families eventually got what they wanted with subsequent EPA actions and criminal prosecutions. My husband and I are both attorneys. Last year, he was involved in a case in which the outcome was simply criminal. I felt I could relate in a deeper sense to the drama in A Civil Action after experiencing such a travesty of justice firsthand. We have to work within the confines of the flawed legal system that exists now, but we must accept that it is far from perfect. Judges and juries--as humans--get things wrong all the time. This book, in gripping prose, demonstrates this basic fact of life in all too vivid of detail.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing and emotionally wrenching work of reportage
Review: On the face of it, a nearly 500-page recounting of a hideously complex legal case involving large corporations would not make for especially compelling reading. But it _does_.
Jonathan Harr followed the emotionally wrenching case of Anne Anderson, et al, vs. W. R. Grace & Co., et al, for eight years. With a masterful sense of pacing, he shows children in the working-class town of Woburn, Massachusetts falling ill with leukemia, then dying. Gradually it becomes clear that the cause is related to the water they drink--specifically, a town well that has been contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent listed by the EPA as a "probable" carcinogen. Two corporations, W. R. Grace & Company and Beatrice Foods, each had manufacturing plants near the wells. The horror of the leukemia deaths begets a horror of a legal case, pitting the residents of Woburn (David) against the accused corporate polluters, W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods (Goliath). Harr does a wonderful job of making its complexities readily understandable and dramatic. He sets scenes with a novelist's skill; his awe-inspiring research allows him to portray the emotions and intentions of the principal lawyers on each side with vivid, memorable detail. By book's end our view of the legal system has been broadened and enlightened by this single case. A Civil Action is a fascinating, page-turning revelation of the practice of law. It is one of the finest works of nonfiction I've read in the last few years, and a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in nonfiction.
Rating:
Summary: More to all this?
Review: There is a man who wrote a book manuscript later rewritten as a movie script with actual names concealed about one year prior to this book about a handicapped,neglected and abused orphan living in Woburn in the same neighborhoods of the earliest childhood victims. The work was written with no knowledge of Harr or of this case. the movie script was forwarded to Hollywood. At the time the man had a "friend" living next town over and as far as the man knew neither the man forwarding the script knew the "friend" or vice-versa.
After Harr's book came out, the man came under heavy attack and the man was confused as to why. One day he talked with "friend" about his concerns,Harr's book and his own script and "friend" blurted out "Well, i'm not going to jail......" and changed the subject never offering an explanation.
Has a child who survived this been monitored all his life by individuals who feel threatened by the Woburn case?
Rating:
Summary: A Legal Thriller
Review: This book is the best I have read in a long while. Big major companies think they can do whatever they want, even cost people there lives by dumping harmful solvents such as TCE which causes leukemia and other disorders. Childrens lives are taken because of the actions of these corporations. The dumping of these harmful solvents results in the towns wells to get polluted, through groundwater (water underground). The famalies of these children press charges against the organizations not for money but for redemption and so that they know they can't do whatever they want and they will have to pay the price. You learn so many things in this book from all the facts in it, it totally blows you away. Once you pick it up, you wont be able to put it down until the last page.
Rating: 
Summary: Untold story
Review: In the 1960s a boy named "Ben" (pseudonym)lived in Woburn in all the areas affected by the water problem. His mother was a friend of Michael Gatta, who had unsuccessfully brought a lawsuit against the city in an effort to determine the cause of the water problems in the 1960s. Ben was treated at all the hospitals in the area the kids mentioned here were treated in and even had a Patten bottom brace and "aseptic necrosis of the femoral head" in his medical history,also mentioned in this book. Ben was admitted to a hospital <1 year old,given a procedure involving bone marrow biopsy in the hip,sequestered without visitors in a hospital in New York in which no definitive medical diagnosis was entered into the medical record and released after >2 yrs consecutive hospital stay back to Woburn.While in Woburn,Ben was repeatedly brought into the Woburn District Court for proceedings of some sort in the late 1960s-1970.Twenty-five years later,access to those court records were denied without so much as a hearing before Judge Cullen.In the early 1980s, another man appeared in Woburn bearing the same name as Ben and who began using Ben's address as a cover for his own activities,such as going AWOL from the Army.
When this book came out,Ben worked for Grace Corp. as a safety and environmental professional and was suddenly terminated without reason. Individuals who had befriended Ben suddenly began acting hostile and guarded and later ties to individuals linked to Omnitech International and these "friends" became apparent, of which Grace was a client. Ben's medical records,including those hospitals the children and families of Woburn were treated at,began disappearing.Ben began going to the Woburn library to research his own unknown family history and quickly came under scrutiny of plainclothes men who stood over his shoulder at the microfilm machine of unindexed Woburn Daily Times newspapers of the 1960s. Later men in suits began following Ben and taking notes in public places such as the local pub as Ben discussed Woburn,his own unknown history and the bizarre occurrences following Harr's book.
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