Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School

This book was excellent, well written, hard to put down (dense but full of facts so worth the read). I rarely post reviews online but this one warranted it. It makes such a good case - it's a good legal procedural as well as a really good "whodunnit" - trying to get to the bottom of what happened, who the players are, etc. Highly recommended.

This intense, clearly and compellingly written, painstakingly researched epic is a human tragedy set in a medical and environmental disaster affecting children and their teachers, and the residents of an entire neighborhood. While similar cancer clusters have appeared in other locations, the clear cause of the cancer cluster at Beverly Hills High School has blinded the local government, parents and other residents, and has caused them to act against the best interests of their children and community, dooming them to a huge risk of an array of early fatal cancers. Horowitz has dug deeply into the scientific background and legal action of this disaster, producing a page-turner, despite the volume of information. If this can happen in a wealthy community with the resources of Beverly Hills, it can happen anywhere (and is). Anyone interested in the intersection between business and environmental and legal issues must read this excellent book, which in my opinion should win the Pulitzer Prize!!!!

I can't believe how much of a page-turner this book is, given the complex and technical nature of the subject. I was hooked on the second page when the author described the magazines in a hospital waiting room having pages as limp as silk. Such details give a texture to the material which could in other less competent hands be as dry as a bone. That and the fact that the author, an alumna of Beverly Hills High, isn't hopeless about the hideous, head-in-the-sand response from the School District and the City of Beverly Hills. It's a truly marvelous book!

It's a rare privilege to be able to join a journalist at the top of her game in her search for the truth. That is what Joy Horowitz invites and allows us to do. I urge everyone awake to accept the invitation and read this book. Then go wake up someone else and give it to them. It's too important to miss and it's a thrilling, chilling, moving and finally remarkably human story. Don't miss this one!

Joy Horowitz, a journalist by trade, has taken the discipline, curiosity and objectivity inherent to her profession and applied these attributes to an intensely controversial, emotional topic-whether the industries adjacent to her alma mater, Beverly Hills High School, have, for decades, poisoned the children who are students there. For many years the presence of an oil drilling platform immediately adjacent to the athletic fields and, on another side of the campus, the proximity to the facilities that process the air for nearby Century City, have been a subject of vigorous debate regarding their potential for causing health hazards. The appearance of cancer "clusters" among the alumni and faculty of Beverly Hills High School was trivialized by school administrators and minimized by city officials. Four years in the writing, Horowitz has meticulously investigated all angles of this story, mastering the most technical of material and rendering it with an articulate, personal, and comprehensible style. What emerges will change forever the way you think about where you work, live, and play. Of even greater import, it demands that everyday people begin to analyze the impact that "progress" has on our health and safety, and no longer complacently believe that someone else has our best interests at heart.