![]() ![]() ![]() Grace (represented by William Cheeseman of Boston's Foley, Hoag & Eliot). Harr wisely downplays the dying-children angle, focusing instead on Schlichtmann's case against the two corporate Goliaths who dumped the waste: Beatrice Foods (represented by Jerome Facher of Boston's Hale & Dorr) and W.R. Egomaniacal, quixotic, workaholic, greedy, altruistic, and naive, Schlichtmann is Everylawyer, and as he allows the Woburn case to consume his practice, he almost loses his license and his life. This is magazine journalist Harr's first book, but his complex portrait of Schlichtmann is the work of a master. But in 1979, the accidental discovery of carcinogenic industrial wastes in the town's wells led the grieving parents to hire personal-injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, new to the profession but intoxicated with the sizable damages he'd won so far. ![]() ![]() The parents suspected the water supply, which was foul-smelling, rusty, and undrinkable, but they had no hard evidence of a link to the cancers. In the mid-'70s, the small industrial town of Woburn, Mass., found itself afflicted with a plague of biblical dimensions: 12 local children, 8 of them close neighbors, had died (or were dying) of leukemia. A crash course in big-bucks tort litigation, as rich as any novel on the scene. ![]()
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