A once idyllic American landscape is home to a closely knit, rural community that, for more than a generation, has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming that had been making them sick and damaging their homes. After years of frustration and futile attempts to bring about change, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, brought suit against one of the world's most powerful corporations-and, miraculously, they won. Wastelands takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America's farmland, and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight. W
The extraordinary story of how some neighbors of hog operations in North Carolina battled a meatpacking company polluting their neighborhoods ... Addison, an attorney and best-selling novelist, is the ideal writer to tell this story ... Wastelands is full of memorable people ... Corban Addison hasn’t written a polemic about hog factories ... He has calmly assembled a legal thriller, full of energy and compassion, that addresses issues of real importance, like the works of John Grisham and Scott Turow. Grisham wrote the foreword to this book, and in it, he says: 'Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and told with the air of suspense that few writers can handle, Wastelands is a story I wish I had written.' I agree with Grisham. But I wish that Wastelands were a work of dystopian science fiction, not a damning portrait of how we feed ourselves now.
As Addison shows, there is a better way to handle waste on large hog farms, but corporations resist spending the money. Especially interesting for ag-law students and any reader who appreciates stories of justice served.
Absorbing and inspiring ... [A] page-turning exposé of corporate malfeasance ... The book reads like a thriller (John Grisham provides the foreword) and strikingly underscores why American courts are so often a last resort for those wronged by structural economic injustice ... A gripping David-vs.-Goliath story that remains suspenseful to the final page.
