| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution. By Devra Lee Davis. New York: Basic Books, 2002. xx + 316 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Paper $16.95.
From Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet (Little, Brown, 1948) to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) and Paul R. Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Random House, 1968), the literature of American environmentalism is replete with books that raise warnings about new dangers to human health or environmental quality. In When Smoke Ran Like Water, Devra Lee Davis, a toxicologist who has researched the environmental causes of diseases such as breast cancer and served on scientific advisory boards appointed by the federal government to assess pollution, steps forward as the latest Paul Revere to sound the alarm against toxic chemicals.	1
The book operates simultaneously on four different levels. On the most fundamental level, Davis provides detailed and contextualized accounts of several major pollution episodes, including the 1948 Donora inversion and London's 1952 "killer fog," and the emergence of smog in Los Angeles and elsewhere. She also explores the chronic health risks posed by toxic chemicals by investigating, for instance, the environmental sources of breast cancer and male infertility.	. . .

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