Cleaning Up

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