»A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr's riveting narrative of a massive litigation case pits the small town of Woburn, MA against the Evil Conglomerates of Beatrice and W. R. Grace; the flamboyant and obsessive lawyer who eventually steers the case to the court holds our attention as much as does the medical trauma underlying the suit. Harr was an insider for the duration of the trial, and party to the litigator's various faults and problems. The story has an unsettling sense of failure hanging over it, but one cannot easily say whether the failure belongs to the families who refuse to move away from the toxic waste, the companies who have knowingly or ignorantly dumped the waste, or to the litigator himself. Perhaps each party has some degree of failure. This story is as exciting as any John Grisham novel, and has a plot with elements familiar from each of those books.