Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (2013) by Dan Fagin is the true story of a small New Jersey town decimated by industrial pollution. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and was a winner of The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award.

Toms River is one of New Jersey’s innumerable quiet seaside towns. It was the setting for large chemical companies to dump tens of thousands of leaking drums into open pits and to release billions of gallons of acid-tinged wastewater into the town’s river. This travesty had gone on for years, causing a cluster of childhood cancers that were found to be scientifically linked to local water and air pollution.

In 1971, an independent trucker, with a documented legal history, began throwing leaky drums filled with industrial waste onto the soil of a broken-down chicken farm in Toms River. Eight years later, a teacher living four miles away gave birth to a baby boy who was born riddled with tumors on his face and chest. His doctors believed he would not live until his first birthday. They were wrong. This marked the beginning of what would come to light in Toms River culminating in an unprecedented legal settlement topping 35 million dollars and a government study confirming the cause of a cluster of childhood cancers linked to polluted air and water.



Fagin goes back sixty years, recounting the saga of rampant pollution and the lack of oversight that put Toms River on the map as a cautionary tale. He introduces the scientists and doctor pioneers who were the first to identify pollutants as the cause of these cancers as well as the ordinary people of Toms River who fought for justice. He tells the stories of a young boy with rapid-growing tumors that had ravaged his body since birth, the nurse who fought to bring the overwhelming incidences of child cancers to the attention of authorities who refused to listen, and the mother who became an advocate for change after her child became ill.

Toms River is an epic story of midnight chemical dumpers and daylight fraud, of government neglect and corporate greed, and the brave citizens who refused to give up until the truth came out. The book skillfully combines hard-core investigative journalism and scientific discovery. Fagin spent more than seven years researching and writing this book. It is both scientifically accurate and thorough.

Fagin is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. He was the environmental writer for Newsday. His articles on cancer epidemiology were recognized by the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers.