Highway 202 veers west from Anniston, Alabama, population 24,000, as if it suddenly just decided to get the hell out of town. . . . Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub, home to a Monsanto chemical plant as well as a federal depot for chemical weapons. Now its notoriety comes from its exceptionally high cancer rate-some 25 percent above the state norm-and the town's determined citizens, who joined together and struck back at the corporation that employed them-and poisoned them. Dennis Love's bold, gripping narrative unfolds through the stories of three Annistonians: David Baker, the black community activist and environmental folk hero who would lead the charge against the polluters; Chip Howell, the white mayor who defended and provided political cover for the army; and the author himself, a native son who shares his memories and offers compelling insight as the events unfold. Throughout, Love introduces a diverse collection of citizens-heroes and villains, bystanders and victims-whose experiences put a human face on this modern tragedy. "Anniston-," Love writes, "created from whole cloth to serve exclusively at the pleasure of commerce, a Reconstruction-era ?model city' envisioned by its profiteering yet starry-eyed founders as a Utopian centerpiece of the Industrial Age-became the victim of a staggering, even historic, environmental double-whammy, brought on by the harsh, consumptive legacy of its longstanding paternal influences, the twin gods of Industry and National Defense." As provocative and timely as Erin Brokovich or A Civil Action, My City Was Gone is a magnificently told true story of ordinary citizens in a small Southern town who led a legendary fight against corporate pollution and wrongdoing.