Toms River

Dan Fagin tells the story of Toms River, New Jersey, where the chemical company Ciba-Geigy and its predecessors dumped industrial waste for decades, from 1952 into the 1980s, and the childhood cancer cluster that residents and, eventually, scientists came to believe the pollution had caused. Fagin follows the town from the company's arrival, drawn by cheap land and lax regulation, through years of dumped dye waste and contaminated wells that residents suspected long before any agency confirmed it, and into the difficult science of proving a statistical link between a specific pollutant and specific childhood cancers, a burden of proof that took years of epidemiological study to even partially meet.

The book moves between the residents whose children became sick, the scientists who spent years trying to establish causation against genuine scientific uncertainty, and the company officials who resisted both regulation and liability at every stage. Fagin does not flatten the science into an easy villain story; he takes seriously how difficult it actually is to prove that a given case of childhood cancer came from a specific source of contamination rather than from chance, even in a town where the cluster itself was statistically undeniable.

Reading Toms River means moving through both a local environmental disaster and a broader history of environmental epidemiology as a science still working out its own methods in real time. It suits a reader drawn to science writing that does not oversimplify uncertainty for the sake of a cleaner story, and to a slow, well evidenced reckoning between a community, a company and the scientific process that eventually connected them.