April 16, 2014

Professor Dan Fagin’s Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation wins Pulitzer Prize

Professor Dan Fagin, director of the Carter Journalism Institute’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP), won the prize in the category of “General Nonfiction” for his book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Bantam Books), which tells the story of a New Jersey town ravaged by industrial pollution, with a cluster of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution.

“It’s high time a book did for epidemiology what Jon Krakauer’s best-selling ‘Into Thin Air’ did for mountain climbing: transform a long sequence of painfully plodding steps and missteps into a narrative of such irresistible momentum that the reader not only understands what propels enthusiasts forward, but begins to strain forward as well, racing through the pages to get to the heady views at the end,” a New York Times reviewer wrote last March.