Author Description

Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action is a nonfiction account of the legal case between several families in Woburn, Massachusetts, and two corporations, Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace.When the book begins, a young boy named Jimmy Anderson gets sick. His mother, Anne Anderson, believes it is just a cold. Jimmy's condition rapidly deteriorates, however, and soon he is diagnosed with leukemia. Approximately the first quarter of the book presents the backstory of the Andersons and several other Woburn families whose children are stricken with leukemia. The cases all occur within a relatively small neighborhood, an uncanny coincidence that leads Anne to seek legal representation.She and the other families with sick children enlist the services of a lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann, who puts together the lawsuit that will try the two corporations for poisoning the groundwater that would spread hazardous chemicals into the water supply that led to the Woburn neighborhood in question. Schlichtmann is an obsessive, odd figure. He believes in a grand destiny for himself, which is what leads him to take the case, a case that few other lawyers would even consider, given the enormity of its size and the difficulty in proving the link between the chemicals and the cluster of leukemia cases...