A Civil Action.

Between 1964 and 1979, residents in Woburn, Massachusetts, an industrial suburb north of Boston, complained that their tap water had developed a nasty taste, a strong, bleach-like odor, and a peculiar rust color. During the same period, 20 Woburn residents developed leukemia. Most of the victims were children. In one neighborhood, East Woburn, the incidence of leukemia was seven times the normal rate. "If I stand on my front porch," observed the mother of one boy who later died of leukemia, "I can see all these houses where children with leukemia live."

The families of the sick suspected that what doctors viewed as a puzzling statistical "cluster" was really a leukemia epidemic caused by the city's foul drinking water. Eventually, officials discovered that two of the city's public wells were contaminated with trichloroethylene and other industrial chemicals, the apparent sources of which were a nearby tannery and a nearby manufacturing plant. The two wells were shut down, and the leukemia rate dropped back down to normal.

To a public that's been fed a steady diet of environmental horror stories during the past 20 years, this narrative may sound commonplace, but it isn't. Because of considerable uncertainties in enviromnental epidemiology, the number of instances in which the dumping of toxic wastes can be linked, even informally, to horrible sickness and death are few. (Indeed, the most famous toxic waste dump of all, Love Canal in western New York, has yet to yield clear evidence of elevated cancer levels 16 years after its discovery.) It's even rarer that a link between exposure to specific toxic wastes and cancer is affirmned--however tentatively--by an august body like the National Academy of Sciences. But the NAS, in a 1991 report, found such a link in its review of the Woburn leukemia cases.

The families of Woburn were the victims of an injustice whose consequences were unmistakably tragic. But if one accepts their unhappy plight as a given, the families were, by the logic of modern tort law, quite lucky. They knew (as much as anyone can) that industrial pollutants had killed their children, and they knew (as much as anyone can) which factories those industrial pollutants had come from. Rather than drown in helplessness, they could turn their grief to righteous anger against a clear societal wrong and, specifically, against Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace, the deep-pocket corporations that owned the tannery and the manufacturing plant, respectively. The Woburn families had, in other words, a dream lawsuit.

A Civil Action is the story of that lawsuit, and, more generally, of how the moral rightness of a cause can be rendered irrelevant by a trip through America's legal system. The author, Jonathan Harr, was a writer for the late, lamented New England Monthly, a magazine that spawned more than its share of gifted young nonfiction writers. Harr's book, though lengthy, is an amazingly swift read that will probably reach a large audience. ("Soon to be a major motion picture from Disney Studios, directed by Robert Redford," boasts Random House's promotional blurb. After reading the book, I'm not surprised.) The book has the texture and narrative drive of a true-crime saga, even though it's really about the (theoretically) stodgier world of litigation. As viewers of Court TV and CNN flock to infotainment spectaculars like the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Harr's book offers troubling evidence that the most luridly dramatic stories our courts have to tell may be found not in criminal trials, but in civil ones. Maybe it will spawn a new genre: the true-lawsuit book.

But Harr's book is more than just a page-turner. It's a subtle and edifying tale about how even the "best" lawsuits--those where the plaintiffs are battling a clear injustice--can create misery. And not just for the defendants, but for the plaintiff's and even--now here's the real surprise--for the plaintiffs' attorney.

At the center of the book is Jan Schlichtmarm, an ambulance-chasing attorney whose obsession with the Woburn case seems to mix equal parts of greed and idealism. Schlichtmann takes on the case as a hot Boston lawyer on his way up; by the book's end, nearly a decade later, the case has bankrupted Schlichtmann (even though he's won a huge settlement from W.R. Grace), and he is contemplating suicide.

Great narrative journalism depends to some degree on luck, and in choosing Schlichtmann as his central character Harr was very lucky indeed. Although Schlichtmann, who is theatrical and ambition-crazed, must initially have seemed larger than life, Harr couldn't have known that the arc of his life would be shaped quite so profoundly by the Woburn case. By telling the story largely through Schlichtmann's eyes, Harr accomplishes several things simultaneously.

First, he makes clear that once the Woburn case entered the legal arena, it wasn't the Woburn families' story, but Schlichtmann's. The families of Woburn, whose sad narrative is told with great force in the book's first 50 pages, disappear almost entirely from the story once the lawsuit begins. That seems faithful to reality; as far as I can tell, the Woburn plaintiffs quickly became irrelevant to the judicial combat related in the book. Indeed, because the phase of the trial where the families were to testify never occurred, they don't figure even as witnesses.

Reading the story mainly from Schlichtmann's point of view also enables the reader to experience something akin to Schlichtmann's obsession with the Woburn case. Environmental lawsuits are about dull things like geology and epidemiology and chemistry, and involve endless technical drudgery. But because Harr, like the best mystery novelists, makes his protagonist's obsession with rooting out the truth infectious, the reader is swept along through what is, after all, a lot of geology and epidemiology and chemistry. As an environmental reporter, I can attest that it is no small feat to write about such matters in a way that renders them easy for a reader to understand on a concrete level, but Harr succeeds wonderfully. The final reason Schlichtmann is the right character on whom to hang this story is that he enables Harr to mark subtle signposts throughout the book about how events will unravel. Schlichtmann is a great lawyer, but he also has his meter running, and as the book progresses the reader becomes increasingly aware that the costs of proving corporate harm are consuming more and more of victory's likely spoils. This is true of all big lawsuits, but it seems especially true of the Woburn case, both because Schlichtmann is a maniacal perfectionist willing to spend untold sums on top experts, and because he has a taste for extravagance. Throughout the book Schlichtmann is seen renting expensive rooms in hotels like New York's Helmsley Palace and Boston's Ritz-Carlton to conduct settlement discussions. "This is for us, for our inner strength," his partner explains.

I won't spoil the book's ending (it's no small accomplishment for a nonfiction writer to inspire such secrecy in his reviewers) and reveal exactly how much of the Woburn families' booty was gone by the time Schlichtmann's lawsuit was done. Nor will I describe precisely how ghastly is the picture that emerges of ruthless corporate lawyers and rather slow-witted and (in one instance, at least) clearly biased judges. Suffice it to say that the reader leaves A Civil Action convinced that a courtroom is almost never a logical place to go if you want to solve society's problems, even when justice is on your side. The message is depressing, but the book is absolutely marvelous.