They Poisoned the World
Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Riveting . . . Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time [is] a book that none of us can afford to miss.”—The Washington Post
A gripping investigation of the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/E.O WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Scientific American, Booked Up
In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals—used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing—had known about their hazards for decades.
In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake tells the astonishing story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being. By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases. At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by our government’s appallingly lax regulatory system—a system that has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment.
Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and tens of thousands of documents, Blake interweaves the secret history of forever chemicals with the moving story of how a lone village took on the chemical giants—and won. From the beloved local doctor to the young mother who took her fight all the way to the nation’s capital, citizen activists in Hoosick Falls and beyond have ignited the most powerful grassroots environmental movement since Silent Spring.
Humane and revelatory, this book will provoke outrage—and hopefully inspire the change we need to protect the health of every American for generations to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This troubling debut report from journalist Blake examines the dangers of "forever chemicals," or PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), through the plight of one upstate New York town. Blake describes how the Manhattan Project's need for a substance capable of withstanding the corrosive by-products of uranium extraction spurred physicists to develop PFAS in the 1940s. Manufacturers DuPont and 3M found commercial uses for the chemicals in such products as nylon stockings and Teflon cookware, the profitability of which made the companies reluctant to scale back PFAS use despite internal research linking the chemicals to numerous cancers and birth defects. Blake drives home the toll of such negligence through a finely observed account of how Michael Hickey—a Hoosick Falls, N.Y., insurance underwriter whose father died from cancer after working for years at the town's Teflon factory—banded together with a doctor and local EPA official to investigate residents' premature deaths. They found that DuPont and other chemical companies had knowingly released lethal amounts of hazardous chemicals into the town's air and waterways, resulting in a $65 million legal settlement in 2021. Blake presents Hickey's crusade as a crackling David vs. Goliath story, and her impressive research provides damning evidence of PFAS manufacturers' callous indifference. Readers will be outraged.
