The Truth About Smog.("When Smoke Ran Like Water" by Devra Davis)(Book Review)

Devra Davis peered into the South African bush trying to find a lion she had been told was no more than 20 feet away. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn't see it--until it suddenly roared and charged her vehicle at a seemingly impossible speed. (Fortunately, the beast was bluffing and pulled back at the last moment.) For Davis, this fright has come to epitomize the human capacity for looking without seeing. Davis, an epidemiologist, has spent most of her professional life examining reams of data on pollution and public health and trying to discern patterns.

One of the things that makes "When Smoke Ran Like Water," her book on the battle against pollution, so powerful is that Davis hasn't merely studied the data, she's lived them. She grew up in Donora, a small town nestled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania where everybody relied for their living on the local steel mill. She never wondered why the landscape beyond her one-story cinderblock home was barren and brown, or why so many elderly women were, like her grandma Bubbe, bedridden and tethered to an oxygen tank. To her and her neighbors, it was perfectly natural to play near ditches filled with iridescent, oily water, and to endure smog so thick people sometimes would get lost in the familiar streets. But children played, adults worked: life was good.

Then the lion began to stir. In the 1950s the steel mills began to close down and people started quietly leaving Donora. Just as Davis was entering high school, her family moved to Pittsburgh. While attending classes at the university, Davis heard about a town in western Pennsylvania that was infamous for its pollution--particularly the smog of 1948 (Davis was a toddler) that killed 20 people and made thousands ill. The town was called Donora. That day she came home, dropped her books on the kitchen table and said, "Mom, was there another place called Donora?"

This bit of self-knowledge launched Davis into her career. She came to realize that the pollution her town endured wasn't some transient event like smog, which wreaks destruction and then vanishes. She learned that toxins in the air and water insinuate themselves into our bodies and stay there, sometimes permanently. Even as her family and friends dispersed, they continued to suffer health effects. Her mother endured heart attacks routinely. Her "dazzling, athletic Uncle Len dropped dead at the age of 50 on a handball court in southern California, years and miles away from the Monongahela River Valley," she writes. "But ...