Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ATTACK It was like a Hitchcock movie, but it was real life. Last week scientists reported that fire ants--so named because their sting feels like a hot poker--swarmed Mississippi nursing homes, attacking and killing two patients. The elderly patients were bedridden and couldn't escape the invaders. But healthy folks who live in infested areas--such as the Southeast and parts of California--are also vulnerable to attacks. If you see the creatures indoors, immediately exterminate them with pesticide before they close...
...Whistle-Blowers Who Beat Big Tobacco (Little, Brown; 384 pages; $24.95), Michael Orey, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, describes the American journey from a public attitude of "Tough luck, buddy" to the group-grievance activism of the '90s, brought to lucrative fruition in lawsuits--by Mississippi, Minnesota and 38 other states--that have extruded from the tobacco industry the promise of close to $250 billion, to be paid out over 25 years...
Orey dramatizes rather than sermonizes. Assuming the Risk, a first-rate exercise of narrative journalism, assembles an eccentric cast of characters. Don Barrett, for example, was a garden-variety white racist as a student at the University of Mississippi ("I do feel that the Negro is inherently unequal," he told a New York Times interviewer in 1963, around the time James Meredith was integrating Ole Miss). In the fullness of time, he became a born-again Christian and crusading lawyer who took up the cause of Nathan Horton, a black carpenter and contractor who smoked two packs of Pall Malls...
Finally, Orey focuses on Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore's brainstorm: his novel lawsuit against the entire tobacco industry to recover the state's Medicaid costs. The idea worked with thermonuclear effectiveness, blowing tobacco's safe and unlocking the dirty billions...
...being mostly about money and therefore--considering all the ambient death and suffering--weirdly beside the point. It is a little difficult, despite Orey's exertions on behalf of the antitobacco lawyers, to find heroes in the drama. Riches are redistributed from one class of the venal to another. Mississippi's Medicaid legal team is awarded fees of $1.43 billion. Dick Scruggs, a leader of the team, buys himself a bigger private plane and a $200,000 Bentley; he trades in his 61-ft. motor yacht for one 30 ft. longer. Justice triumphs...