Michael Kinsley, in his Nov. 23 Washington Post column (published alongside this piece in print editions of the Post-Gazette), admitted that as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards, he did not actually read all 400 books nominated. He leaves the process with a couple hundred of pounds of books and his reputation for refreshing candor intact.
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| | | Devra Davis, visiting professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School, is the author of "When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution" (Basic Books). | |
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As a member of the final four losers in the enterprise, I come home with a much lighter load, packing a bronze medal, a thousand-dollar check and a plaque extolling my new book for making "terrifyingly clear the almost unbelievable story of the collusion between the federal government and private corporations in cases of environmental pollution."
I also have a confession to make. Kinsley, while you are bold and daring for telling the truth, you are wrong about one thing. There is decidedly not "too much nonfiction going on in the world already without writers adding to it." Indeed, we would all be much better off if the stories in my book of double-dealing on the environment were relegated solely to history, or were just not true. But truth is not only stranger than fiction, it can also be more deeply unsettling when your darkest nightmares turn out to be real.
Nonfiction books about serious topics are just as vital as the hard-hitting journalism that you practice, and perhaps even more important in the scope and scale they can encompass. They can arrive in the marketplace with fewer restrictions than those faced by the working press who have to contend with the subtle and not-so subtle pressures of advertisers and owners to keep it short, simple and within time and budget. Besides Caro's monumental treatise on Lyndon Johnson, this year's nonfiction finalists provided richly textured accounts that laid bare racist assumptions about genes, the dark side of survivalists and the human failings of those demigods of medicine -- the surgeons.
My own book tells stories of how the environment shapes life, death and sex, in ways that could never be compressed into the short, quick, snappy medium of electronic zines or op-ed pages. The town I grew up in was famous in the way that Jack the Ripper and the Son of Sam were famous -- except, of course, nobody ever talked about it. I had to leave my hometown of Donora, in the Mon Valley, before learning that 18 very real, very hard-working people had dropped dead one day during a massive inversion of smoky fumes from the local mills and stoves in the fall of 1948. From what I have heard since writing this book, I have only scratched the surface of what remains to be found out.
The epidemic of lead poisoning that still afflicts some children today is dreadful. But this story becomes even more appalling when looked at in terms of how badly some firms behaved all along. In the 1920s, the Ethyl Corp. resorted to sexy advertising to push liquid lead, then known to be a potent brain poison, into gasoline. A saucy, flapper invited men "to fill their tank with Ethyl and get a kick instead of a knock."
In the 1960s and 1970s, major car firms solemnly and repeatedly assured the government that reducing tailpipe emissions would bring the country and their firms to bankruptcy. Over the past three decades, some chemical firms withheld and manipulated information on the dangers to workers and lobbied successfully to change the ranking of toxic chemicals. At the same time, coal and oil groups secretly and sometimes openly underwrote scientific debates aimed at retarding efforts to control local pollution and the growing global threats to the Earth's protective ozone layer and its fragile envelope of greenhouse gases.
What makes all this important right now? The problems I have charted are hardly history and hardly nonfiction. The past week's headlines make clear that we are in the midst of an undeclared war on the environment.
The EPA has just announced it will change the way that companies get to average their industrial pollution, tweaking the system so that factories will be able to release more and do less about it. Old coal-fired power plants will be exempt from putting on new controls, if they can show they are releasing less than the worst they did in the past decade.
When it comes to assessing the science underlying these and other decisions in the government, things have hit a new low. The foxes are about to take charge of the chicken coop.
At the Centers for Disease Control, scientists who have argued that children can safely be exposed to higher levels of lead have been placed on committees to recommend how to remedy lead poisoning in children. They appear poised to define the problem away. At the international agencies charged with declaring which chemicals should be deemed cancer causing, an unprecedented revision is under way to lower the hazard rating on a number of major industrial chemicals.
Kinsley is correct that "ultimately a book-award judge's fate -- like that of the books being judged -- depends on luck." But, luck happens to those who are in the right time and place.
Maybe my book made it this far because of my good fortune of having had a terrific editor and a great book jacket designer. But it may also have something to do with the fact that our society has reached the point of maturity where the need to do better on matters of the environment and our health is broadly understood as are our shared responsibilities.
For those of us not writing pulp fiction, spiritual advice, inside accounts of public figures' private lives or romantic bodice rippers, groups such as the National Book Foundation remain a blessing. Contrary to Kinsley's droll view, we need all the help we can get to pay careful attention to the nonfiction now hitting the fan on matters of the environment and health.
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