Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy

"A chilling indictment of how government and big business prized profits over health, and a moving tale of one woman's struggle to understand why."

"A fast-moving, urgent narrative that catalogues the evidence of the many different forms of pollution and the likelihood that they contributed to the cancers, documenting the choices and treatment she must face as a cancer patient....Even if, as she explains, the facts that what she uncovers wouldn't stand up in court, the book still bears witness to both her own and her sister's trials."

Washington, DC (September 2010) — In her deeply personal book now available in paperback, Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy, former MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour reporter and senior editor at The Harvard Business Review Nancy A. Nichols examines the potentially lethal effects industrial pollution in her hometown had on her and her sister Sue's health. The two women grew up playing on the shores of Lake Michigan in Waukegan, Illinois. Their father, an avid fisherman, fed them the Coho salmon he caught in the lake. They regularly bought groceries at a farmstand that, it would turn out, was located near a contaminated dumping site. In 1984, it was revealed that one million tons of PCBs were embedded in the town's harbor.

As Nichols details in the book, the two sisters did not think twice of the effects the pollutants could have on their own health until Sue was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer in 1992. A few years after Sue's death, after already struggling to get pregnant, Nancy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With little family history of cancer, she kept a deathbed promise to her sister to find out if their rare cancers were somehow caused by exposure to industrial pollutants. The result is Lake Effect, a book that tackles not only Nichols' emotional journey through illness, but uncovers the troubling history of her hometown, where locals once shouted, "Asbestos to the South and PCBs to the North."

In order to fully understand the chemicals that threatened her health, Nichols investigated the Superfund sites in Waukegan, the companies that dumped chemicals into the lake and onto the town itself, and how those chemicals potentially traveled from factories into her family's bodies. She questions the government that turned a blind eye to this poisoning, and why America still allows thousands of untested and potentially harmful, even deadly, chemicals into our food, water, and environment.

As Nichols shows in Lake Effect, each and every one of us carries a significant body burden garnered over a lifetime of chemical exposures. For that reason, this is not just a book about two sisters, but a book about all of us.

Nancy A. Nichols is a journalist, editor, and broadcaster whose writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, The Harvard Business Review, and The Nation, among other publications.

Island Press was established in 1984 to stimulate, shape, and communicate the ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems. Publishing approximately 40 books and other information tools a year, we use a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed approach that brings practical solutions to complex challenges like climate change, the depletion of our oceans, sustainable energy and agriculture, and species extinction. A nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, Island Press publishes for scientists, policy makers, environmental practitioners, students, journalists, and the general public. Island Press — Solutions that inspire change.

Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy

By Nancy A. Nichols

An Island Press Paperback

Publication Date: October 15, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-59726-821-9 / Pages: 192/ Price: $ 21.95

Available at www.islandpress.org or www.lakeeffecthebook.com.