Pulitzer Prize General Non Fiction Winner

Toms River

by Dan Fagin

Summary

An investigation into a New Jersey town where decades of illegal industrial dumping by chemical and dye manufacturers produced a cluster of childhood cancers. Fagin pairs old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting with a clear-eyed primer on epidemiology, showing how scientists and parents struggled to link contamination to disease. The book illustrates both the difficulty and the moral urgency of holding polluters accountable in court.

Historical Context & Significance

Fagin combined "pavement-pounding" journalism with complex epidemiology to show how hard it is to prove a "cancer cluster" in a court of law.