Keith O’Brien- Paradise Falls

In the spring of 1977, residents of a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York grew concerned when noxious smelling substances began leaching into basements, floating in local streams and pooling in puddles in backyards and playgrounds. Shortly after, children started suffering mysterious burns while playing outside, and then kids started getting sick—some really sick. What most parents didn’t know was that their homes had been built next to what was once a giant pit called Love Canal, and that decades earlier, Hooker Chemical, the largest employer in the city, had used the canal to dump barrels containing 20,000 tons of chemical waste comprising of some of the most toxic compounds humans ever created. Hooker covered those barrels with earth and then sold the land to the city’s board of education—for a dollar—and the city built an elementary school and a playground directly on top of it. Now, in PARADISE FALLS: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe, New York Times bestselling author Keith O’Brien tells the story of how an unlikely group of neighborhood women uncovered this secret and took on some of the most powerful men in the world, including the governor of New York, a multimillionaire industrialist and the president of the United States, in order to get justice and literally save their families. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Keith O’Brien is a former reporter for The Boston Globe and the New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls and Outside Shot. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico, as well as on National Public Radio shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition. He lives in New Hampshire.