My City Was Gone: One American Town's Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court

by Dennis Love

Book Overview

Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006058551X
• ISBN13: 9780060585518
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Recommended - The Poisoning of Anniston, Alabama

My City Was Gone recounts journalist Dennis Love's return to his former home in Anniston, Alabama; the book, however, is not just about his homecoming. Love focuses on the Monsanto Corporation's environmental crimes in Anniston. Monsanto spent decades dumping pollutants in the local ecosystem. Anniston's residents subsequently developed incredibly-high rates of many diseases, including cancer. In My City, Love examines Anniston's impact on the outside world and the outside world's (often- negative) impact on Anniston. There are many things to like about the book. Love is a talented writer with a good sense of the rhythm (peaks and valleys) in his story; he keeps the narrative moving forward and does not bore you. Also, Love has a good feel for Alabama and its people. He gives a vivid account of what it was like to grow up in Alabama, attend the University of Alabama, and work at the Anniston Star newspaper. He also has a flair for bringing characters to life. In My City, you will meet: a) Donald Stewart - a former U.S. Senator who led the litigation against Monsanto, b) David Baker - who moved away to New York City to work as a labor organizer and then returned to Anniston to help organize the community against Monsanto, and c) Love, who recounts his long journey from Anniston to California and back. Monsanto Corporation is the villain in the story; by any standard, its conduct was horrific. After Monsanto began to pollute the local rivers, the fish in those rivers eventually developed PCB levels 7500 times greater than the allowable level. Even more damning is the fact that Monsanto had known since the 1930s that the PCBs it produced were dangerous to human health. You won't come away from My City is Gone with much respect for corporate America. I thought that there were a few drawbacks to the book. Love recounts the history of Anniston in an overly-long and mildly-interesting section. Love's account, moreover, is very personal and I think that it is fair to say that he is not always objective. For instance, the reader gets the idea that Love was gullible where the lawyers who sued Monsanto are concerned. In one passage Love cites a trial attorney's view of the case: "...it occurred to him that if it was possible to do God's work as a lawyer then... [suing Monsanto]... was about as close as you could get" (p. 238). Of Johnnie Cochran, he writes: "He was smarter than everyone else, more articulate, craftier, and more cunning" (p. 212). I found it somewhat difficult to believe that these attorneys were benevolent crusaders when I read that they split $234 million (39% of the verdict), with one lawyer getting $30 million. Some of the plaintiffs subsequently sued their attorneys over the attorneys' high fees. In the end, this is an important and entertaining story. After reading My City Was Gone, you will be forced to think about the tradeoffs many communities must make when dealing with large corporations.

Dennis Love Pens A Superb Book

BOOK REVIEW A chronicle of small-town lifeand what almost destroyed it By Robert Braile, Globe Correspondent | August 28, 2006 My City Was Gone: One American Town's Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court By Dennis Love Morrow, 344 pp., $25.95 In ``My City Was Gone," Dennis Love's superb book on Anniston, Ala., the journalist at one point meets his old Anniston Star editor for a drink. Love had left his job and hometown years earlier, restless for change. He ended up in California, adrift at 40. ``Then he swung back around on me," Love writes about the editor. `` `Listen,' he said, and I could see him taking me in with a long hard look. `Don't lose track of who you are. Don't distance yourself from the people and places that make you distinctive.' He drained his glass and looked at me again. `Don't get too far from home.' " Love returned home by writing ``My City Was Gone." It displays his talents as a reporter and memoirist in exploring one of America's darkest environmental nightmares, that of the Monsanto Corp oration 's chemical pollution of Anniston and the military's storage and incineration there of a massive stockpile of Cold War chemical weapons. But this book is more than eco-drama, a trend that surged in 1995 with Jonathan Harr's ``A Civil Action" and has thrived since. Love suggests a deeper theme -- that he and Anniston were fated long ago to become who and what they are, and that no one can get too far from home. In a poignant, punchy, New Southern voice, Love probes his life, those of activist David Baker and Mayor Chip Howell, and the late-19th-century ``manufactured" creation of Anniston itself, to make the Faulknerian point that we are our pasts, destined for better or worse to reflect our origins, no matter how far we stray. Anniston's historic patriotism, industrialism, utopianism, and isolationism made it ripe for abuse by Monsanto and the military. Yet its decency, among other traits, helped it prevail over that abuse, evident in a landmark $700 million payout in 2003 by Monsanto and a subsidiary to settle lawsuits against the companies. As for Love, he suggests his place in life turned out to be the very one he had sought to flee, Anniston. ``But Anniston did change," Love writes at the end, gazing at his high school football field. ``I turned my back for only a moment -- or maybe it was twenty years -- and a great reckoning came to pass. People like Chip Howell and David Baker left town and went to college or the big city and came home to lead armies and make decisions and write history, so that childhoods like theirs and mine could be replicated on floodlit football fields and all the other places where young people grow up and learn about life and the living of it. Maybe they even did it so that knights-errant like me could wander to the ends of the earth and then return, if only to make sure that the old home place still stands in the mist, like Tara. And Anniston persists, by