A Civil Action (Vintage)

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Jonathan Harr
Publisher:	Vintage
Release date:	27 August, 1996
List price:	~~$14.95~~
Our price:	$10.17 that is 32% off!

A Civil Action (Vintage)

Average rating: Stars

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A great book. The movie was terrible and did the book an injustice. After reading this book, you will have a love of lawyers.

A Civil Action (Vintage) - Jonathan Harr

Not the whole story by far!

This book focuses on a specific point in local history but excludes the economic friction caused by NASA's interest in Woburn, the finding of a "mystery object" abandoned in a north Woburn garage( which happened to be highly radioactive)and does not discuss the impact on others unknown to the public but whose very lives in some cases have been altered for the worst because of it.
One individual worked for Grace and was quickly fired when this book came out. The individual had written their own autobiographical account in which early years in Woburn were included, describing his own struggles as a crippled,sick child confined to a hospital bed for two years with no family history and no diagnosis on entering or leaving the hospital.Only AFTER this was a diagnosis rendered. The boy was treated at most of the hospitals listed herein when the very earliest kids were treated and lived in precisely the neighborhoods where the polluted wells were and whose mother may have been involved in a 1960s citizen's lawsuit sponsored by Michael Gatta to reveal the Woburn water controversy.
While at Grace the man was involved with a software development program to help companies manage and control their chemicals. Following his sudden termination with Grace,the man appeared to become the target for a major campaign to discredit him and to make him unemployable.Around this time Omnitech International, a mysterious entity, was testing a new database for tracking in the construction and medical fields- both fields in which this person was employed and employed at those 2 companies which were also clients of Omnitech- a "litigation preparation service";an audit trail of the individual might reveal linkage between that individual's circumstances and software implementations at successive employers linked all to him.
The man,concerned about the complexity and tensions surrounding Woburn of the 1960s, wrote a letter to President Clinton suggesting a solution and to clarify some of its history.The letter was forwarded to the EPA for consideration,as Woburn is a Superfund site.This same man also took steps to stop a small branch office of a company renting space in the industrial park created over the polluted area from disposing semiconductor industry chemical waste in the backlot prior to any Hazard Communications law. For stopping this, the man was forced to resign.

Jonathan Harr - A Civil Action (Vintage)

Legal strategy 101

Harr's nonfiction tale of the Woburn case was an engaging way to explore legal strategy and some of the laws of civil procedure. My purpose for reading it was to learn about legal strategy from actual examples that went beyond substantive arguments about the facts of the case. This book did not disappoint. Perhaps the most brutal fact about legal strategy was the importance of money - namely, to fund the expensive discovery stage (i.e., when evidence is gathered) of the lawsuit.

While I did find myself rooting for the plaintiff's attorney, the protagonist of the story, Jan Schlichtmann, I was impressed with Harr's ability to portray the defense counsel in a humane light. The fact that Harr does not lionize Schlichtmann nor demonize his legal opponents (Facher, Cheeseman, Keating) demonstrates why Harr was the recipient of an award for outstanding investigative reporting. In addition to offering a non-romanticized view of an emotionally wrenching situation, Harr succeeds in telling a spellbinding tale. And it is the hard-to-put-down element of this book that, I believe, won it the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995. It is not a short story (500pgs), but the book held my interest and the painstaking narrative of legal details was packaged in as appetizing form as possible.

Harr does not read like Grisham. If you want Grisham's fast-moving plot then stick with Grisham. If you're interested in taking a look at the brutal details and legal chess moves that occur in litigation, then you may enjoy Harr.

Lastly, I disagree with reviewers who accused Harr of failing to flesh out his characters. Since the book is nonfiction Harr cannot take the sort of omniscient perspective available to a Grisham, but he does a fine job of getting inside the character's heads nonetheless.

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