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Also by Diane Wilson:

An Unreasonable Woman, September 2005
Hardcover

AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN
By: Diane Wilson

This is the true story of a showdown between one fearless woman and the nation?s worst polluters. At stake: a town, its people, and a way of life.

A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
September 2005
400 pages
ISBN: 1931498881
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

The time: the late 1980s. The place: Seadrift, Texas, hard- luck fishing port. Diane Wilson, forty-one, a fourth- generation shrimper, had been fishing the bays near her Gulf Coast town from the age of eight.

One morning, while she is running her brother’s fish house at the docks and mending nets, a fisherman hands her a newspaper clipping: an EPA study reports that they live in the most polluted county in the United States. Diane calls a meeting to discuss what the chemical plants are doing to the bays. She starts asking questions about Formosa Plastics, a multi-billion-dollar corporation that has been silencing workers, flouting the EPA, and dumping lethal ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride into the bays.

A privately held multinational ruled by its founder, Formosa Plastics has been prohibited from further expansion in its native Taiwan, yet Calhoun County officials give it the red-carpet treatment to build a massive new plant. Formosa’s Texas cheerleaders include practically every regulator, judge, businessman, and politician from Corpus Christi to Austin.

This is the searing account of a world where greed and power trample justice and anyone bold enough to seek and speak the truth. Wilson takes her fight to the courts, to the gates of the chemical plant, and to the halls of power in Austin and Houston. For her efforts she meets with scorn, bribery, and death threats. Finally, Wilson realizes that she must break the law to win justice: she resorts to nonviolent disobedience, direct action, and debilitating hunger strikes.

An Unreasonable Woman is a novelistic tale of heroism and skulduggery that plays out against a backdrop of colorful outlaw shrimpers and crooked politicians, enviro-activists and informants, grudges and murder, betrayal and redemption. This book heralds the arrival of a vital new literary voice and introduces us to a daring, hopeful women’s activism that the times demand.

Media Buzz

Diane Rehm Show - NPR - September 28, 2005