Baptized in PCBs

Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town

By: Ellen Griffith Spears

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston—from Monsanto's founders to white and African American activists to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2014 Ellen Griffith Spears (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

Robot voice.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Yes for reading. no for this account. The voice reading it sounds computer generated, and the tone of odd.

How could the performance have been better?

Yes.

Compulsively readable, but not a strong audio

What did you like best about Baptized in PCBs? What did you like least?

I enjoyed this book as a book itself. Unfortunately, as an audiobook, it didn't quite commute. bernadette Dunn's narration is so smooth that it almost makes you ahve to rewind and see what you missed. The historical accounts, though well-researched, described so many characters that it got almost impossible to follow it.

Any additional comments?

I will pick up this book in print, when I am more likely to take notes on who did what, the military terminology, and other thigns that listening to this particular performance made nearly impossible.