Families Against Cancer & Toxics

MOVIES

Toxic Trespass: How Safe Are Your Children?
Documentary about children's exposure to carcinogens and other toxics, starting with the body burden results of filmmaker Barri Cohen and her 10-year-old daughter. 2008. Online

Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis
Emotionally compelling documentary about the Fallon leukemia cluster as seen through the children with leukemia and their families. 2003. Order it

Erin Brockovich
Julia Roberts plays a tenacious mom who takes on a major utility company accused of poisoning the nearby community, and wins the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history....$333 million. 2000.

A Civil Action
John Travolta plays attorney Jan Schlichtmann who represents families of children who died in the Woburn childhood leukemia cluster. 1998. From book with same name.

Blue Vinyl
The hazards of bio-accumulation, pollution, and the makeup of what we commonly hope are benign plastics are tackled in this 2002 comic documentary. website

Silkwood
Meryl Strep plays Karen Silkwood, a worker at a plutonium processing plant who advocated for worker safety, was purposely contaminated with radiation, and died in a one-car crash while driving to deliver evidence to a New York Times reporter. 1983.


BOOKS

Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children
by Philip and Alice Shabecoff, 2008.
This excellent expose gathers evidence about harm of industrial toxics on children, and the current corporate practices that result in exposures. In these days of increases in the incidence of childhood diseases like cancer, autism, asthma and birth defects, this book call for societal changes needed to keep our children safer.

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution
by Devra Davis, 2002.
A leading epidemiologist, best known for her research of the environmental causes of breast cancer and chronic disease, identifies some 300,000 annual deaths in the U.S. and Europe due to pollution, making revelations about historical smog-related mass casualties, and calling for major public changes.

Deceit And Denial: The Deadly Politics Of Industrial Pollution
by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, 2002.
This is a historical account of corporate control of the lead, plastics, and petroleum industries and the campaign of denial regarding the toxic effects on workers, consumers, and the general public of chemicals use in the manufacture of paint, toys, furniture, plasics and other products

Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World: 101 Smart Solutions for Every Family
by Phillip Landrigan and Herbert Needleman, 2002.

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks At Cancer And The Environment
by Sandra Steingraber, 1997.
Steingraber, a biologist and cancer survivor, documents the increasing evidence of a strong link between rising cancer rates and environmental contamination.

American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War
by Carole Gallagher, Keith Schneider, 1993.
Gallagher travelled to Nevada and Utah to interview and photograph the people most harmed by aboveground nuclear testing. The heartbreaking testimonials by the people considered "expendable" by the U.S. government serve as a warning to all of us.

Our Stolen Future: Are We Are Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival-- A Scientific Detective Story
by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Peterson Myers
A groundbreaking book discussing how synthetic chemicals and toxics harm the normal reproductive and developmental process. Their website offers a wealth of information on endocrine disruption, as does the The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX).

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson, 1962.
A shattering look at widespread ecological degradation that touched off the entire environmental health movement. Rachel Carson's book focused on the poisons from insecticides, weed killers, and other common products as well as the use of sprays in agriculture, a practice that led to dangerous chemicals to the food source. Read an online excerpt.

For the Love of Mike
by Linda Gillick, Michael J. Fox, 1994.
Linda Gillick is the director of "Oceans of Love," a support group for the cancer cluster in Ocean County, NJ. Her son Mike had neuroblastoma.

Material Matters
by Kenneth Geiser and Barry Commoner, 2001.
Presents convincing evidence that we can use fewer materials and eliminate use of many toxic chemicals by focusing directly on material use when products are designed.

ONLINE BOOKS
Inconclusive by Design: Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Federal Environmental Health Research. A 71 page expose of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), written in 1992.

Human Radiation Experiments Associated with the U.S. Department of Energy and Its Predecessors

Preventing Cancer: A Campaign for Workers

Secret Fallout
Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island
by Ernest Sternglass

In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development
Ted Schettler MD, MPH, Jill Stein MD, Fay Reich PsyD, Maria Valenti, David Wallinga MD
Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2000