David, Goliath and the Beach-Cleaning Machine: How a Small California Town Fought an Oil Giant-And Won!

Rating:
Summary: How to win when the odds are 13 million to one.
Review: Having had the privilege of proof-reading this book I came away
awestruck on how one man with a principle and fearless resolve
took on a task so humongous it staggers the imagination. The
shear complexity of tiptoeing through the morass of political
organizations and getting them to agree on one subject at the
same time without any ruffled ego's is amazing. Money, power, and
revenge all figure prominently in this titanic epic on how one
man started a snowball that took down a huge oil companie's oil
polution stance from "crumbs" to "total capitulation". Following
this scenario step by step through the court rulings and the
political shenanigans is quite a task for the reader and the
included diagrams help keep everything straight.
Just authoring this book had to be a nightmare of data collection and review.
My work invloved repair of electronic communications terminals
with hundreds of thousands of wires and potential problems and
the complexity of which is on par with what transpired in this
book. I was very impressed on how the story was assembled and
presented and I do not think there are many authors around who
could handle the complexities and present them as well as they were.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific Read
Review: I read this book in its entirety the day I received it in the mail. It is an incredible story, one that is told in a riveting narrative. I absolutely could not believe the lengths to which this oil company went to deny, delay, and stonewall the efforts of so many different people and organizations to hold them responsible for an underground oil spill they had undeniably caused. This book was an eye-opener. If you care about the environment, about energy, or about the law, read this book. I hope someone makes a movie out of this thing; it is such a great story.