Cleaning Up

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About Cleaning Up

Product Description An account of the court action against the Exxon corporation for their huge oil spill off southern Alaska in a boating accident, includes the personal trials--job losses, marital breakups, and suicide contemplation--that took place during the legal trial. 20,000 first printing. Amazon.com Review The day before Good Friday 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood and the crew of the Exxon Valdez pulled out of the northernmost ice-free port in Alaska, bound for Long Beach, California. Just hours after weighing anchor, though, the mammoth supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Cleanup workers labored for months rinsing rocky beaches and swabbing sea otters, but Cleaning Up is about when things really got sticky, as waves of slick plaintiff's lawyers washed ashore along with a flotsam of allegations and a jetsam of subpoenas. Directing the controversial and complex civil action was an ambitious environmental lawyer from Minneapolis, Brian Boru O'Neill. From the beginning, his strategy was to stage a morality play pitting thousands of ordinary Alaskans whose lives and livelihoods depended on Prince William Sound's vast natural resources against a colossal multinational corporation reckless enough to leave 53 million gallons of toxic crude oil in the hands of an alcoholic. But, as Lebedoff writes, no case is that clear-cut; Exxon is no evil empire, and O'Neill foreclosed on small farms before he became a populist crusader. Cleaning Up meticulously reconstructs how one of the worst environmental disasters in history led to the biggest drunk-driving case of all time, but Lebedoff takes the nonfiction legal thriller one step further, personalizing the enormous impersonal devastation, adding flesh and faces to the skeletal frame provided by headlines. --Tim Hogan From Library Journal Lebedoff, a Harvard-trained attorney and senior vice president of Voyageur Asset Management, offers an interesting narrative of one of America's most costly and complex civil trials. The case is based on fishermen's claims against Exxon stemming from the Valdez tanker disaster. Lebedoff attempts to present a balanced history of the entire affair?from Captain Hazlewood's childhood to jury selection and the final damage award. However, his grounding is clearly at the plaintiffs' table, focusing in particular on the background and trial strategy of the plaintiffs' chief litigator, Brian O'Neill. Lebedoff's writing is also a bit too pithy, keeping the work from being comprehensive: "Phase Two [of the trial] need not detain the reader for long, as it did so many others. It came and went." He seems to straddle the line?omitting too much to interest other attorneys while boring lay readers with legalistic detail. Recommended only for large history and environmental collections.?Steven Anderson, Baltimore Cty. Circuit Court Law Lib., Towson, Md. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A blow-by-blow account of legal actions taken against the Exxon Corporation in the wake of the March 23, 1989, Exxon Valdez disaster. Reading this book by attorney/novelist Lebedoff (Ward Number Six, 1972) is much like watching one of the new-realism courtroom dramas on network TV: The pace is hectic; the actors are strapping he-men or (as Lebedoff writes of a young prosecutor) doubles for Daryl Hannah, their characters transparently evil or good; and the script is packed with enough technical detail to satisfy the demand for verisimilitude. Thus, you will learn how lawyers bill clients for their time, how legal reputations are made and broken, and even how toxicologists determine hours after the fact how much alcohol a person may have consumed before, say, an arrest for reckless driving. The last issue was key to the notorious Valdez case, in which Captain Joseph Hazelwood, not long after consuming numerous shots of distilled spirits, left the bridge of the oil tanker he