"At her thirtieth reunion, Horowitz was astonished to learn that so many of her former classmates had cancer. Oil wells under the town of Beverly Hills and the highly regarded high school were apparently the cause. She had some difficulty getting access to documents because of ongoing lawsuits initiated by famed environmental activist Erin Brockovich. Still, Horowitz draws on interviews with cancer specialists, geologists, toxicologists, and former teachers and classmates to relate an amazing story of environmental hazard in one of the nation’s most storied towns, proof that it can happen anywhere. For years students had been living with oil-tinged clothing following workouts on the athletic fields, with oil pumps looming in the background. But town residents, enjoying royalty checks and the tony image of their community, refused to connect the presence of oil pumps and rising reports of cancer in their youth. Horowitz chronicles the residents’ range of emotions, from anger and denial to shame at having done so little to protect their children, as she examines the role of money, image, and continued uncertainty in a community grappling with environmental hazards."
-- Vanessa Bush, Booklist

"Bhopal, Anniston, the Love Canal: Environmental catastrophe usually befalls the poor and uninfluential. Freelance writer Horowitz (Tessie and Pearlie: A Granddaughter's Story, 1996) documents a case that struck in an elite neighborhood—and, as usual, too little was done about it.
     A 1971 graduate, Horowitz returns to Beverly Hills High School—seen in dozens of films, including It's a Wonderful Life—to puzzle out a curious phenomenon: A disproportionate number of her classmates had fallen ill with or died of various cancers. And not just students: In the English department alone, one faculty member remarks, "There was like a death a year." Come the winter of 2003, the incidence had become so high, well beyond the normal distribution of a disease that for the most part is "caused by environmental factors, not genetic ones," that none other than Erin Brockovich had taken on the Beverly Hills High "poisonings" as case and cause. It happens, writes Horowitz, that for half a century the school grounds had doubled as an oilfield, with the city earning a sizable royalty for granting the privilege to a private energy developer; and workers at oil refineries and related facilities are notably susceptible to such illnesses. In these pages, Horowitz writes, bureaucrats dismissed technical questions, such as the on-site treatment of extracted oil with ammonia, radioactive iodine and other toxic elements, early on; one told her that releasing any information would endanger the public in the post-9/11 context, while a state engineer told a worried mother, "Lady, if you don't feel comfortable, you should take your children elsewhere." Horowitz follows the case into court, where a judge ruled, "counter to the available science," in favor of the oil company, prompting the author to decry, with good cause, the state of the current judiciary and regulatory mechanisms.
     A readable companion to Dennis Love's My City Was Gone: The Poisoning of a Small American Town (2006)."
-- Kirkus

"Commingling fame and wealth, Beverly Hills embodies the modern version of the American dream, but journalist Horowitz (Tessie and Pearlie) argues that it's also a modern American nightmare. Her tale of corporate neglect, petty politics, endless legal wrangling and our love-hate relationship with petroleum centers on Beverly Hills High School and its illustrious alumni, oil derricks and alarming number of cancer victims. Initially skeptical of the idea that the profitable oil pumps adjacent to the school have led to an array of horrible diseases among its graduates, especially with celebrity advocate Erin Brockovich poking around the case, Horowitz quickly found herself pulled into a story that raises fundamental questions about how we assess risk and balance our desire for justice with scientific and legal ambiguities about establishing causes and assigning blame. Horowitz is better at raising such questions than answering them, largely because in her case the truth does not come out, the public and even people involved in the litigation begin to lose interest, and no lawsuits have come to trial, let alone been resolved. That doesn't make for very satisfying reading, but it's faithful to a time in which, as Horowitz says, even our will to do right by our communities has been contaminated by competing desires." -- Publisher’s Weekly

“The authoritative account Joy Horowitz puts forth in her eloquent and compelling Parts Per Million is a clarion call about how Big Oil trumps scientific inquiry and definitely trumps concern for the health of children and adolescents, even in cases where coincidence seems beyond the pale. Anyone who thought the Beverly High case was rightfully settled when the judge threw out the first raft of lawsuits in November owes it to him or herself to read this book.”
--Sheila Weller, author of Dancing at Ciro’s: A Family’s Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

“Joy Horowitz's subject involves seven hulking oil derricks on the horizon, all adjacent to Beverly Hills High School. The possibly steep price for this juxtaposition spurs her to consider the toxins in our environment, and to heroically confront insistent obstacles (often thrown up by lawyers) as she searches for the truth. Horowitz raises important alarums, while also cautioning that hers is not a book "about certainty." It is, rather, a fierce, penetrating, vibrant challenge, wisely telling all of us to be aware--and to care.”
--Barry Siegel, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Director of the Literary Journalism Program, UC Irvine, and author of Lines of Defense and the forthcoming A Claim of Privilege

“Joy Horowitz’ Parts Per Million is a remarkable page-turner. In telling the complex story of oil drilling operations on the property of the renowned Beverly Hills High School, she’s put human faces to cancer victims, plaintiffs’ lawyers and rear-end-covering bureaucrats alike. No one escapes her scrutiny; all get to tell their stories. Yet behind the individual human sagas there’s a bigger story about economic power and health risk that reaches far beyond the confines of one of America’s iconic “small towns”.”
--Tom Graff, California Director, Environmental Defense Fund

“How do we keep our children safe is the essential question of Joy Horowitz’s important, brilliant and gripping book. This emotional and startling tale illuminates how difficult this is when weighed against the interests of big oil, the law, the science of medicine, and a community obsessed with its own self-image.”
--Delia Ephron, author of “Hanging Up” and the forthcoming “Frannie in Pieces”

“In Oil! legendary muckraker Upton Sinclair revealed the true mother’s milk of Southern California. Joy Horowitz’s courageous and riveting Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School, drills even deeper and brings to the surface a sump of greed, death and corruption that makes Chinatown seem like chump change.”
-- Roger Director, author of “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants”

"When Joy Horowitz was a student at Beverly Hills High School in the ‘70s, 90210 wasn’t yet a universal code for glitz and glamour. Sure, it was easy enough to spot the child actor from Lassie skateboarding, or Groucho Marx at the pharmacy, or Walt Disney at Roxbury Park, but otherwise, ‘Beverly’ resembled any other high school in America, with its cheerleaders and nerds, madrigal singers and Earth Day organizers, dorky math teachers and toughs sneaking cigarettes. But there was one glaring difference: a tall oil derrick squatting on the football field, its pump jacks bobbing up and down like chickens pecking at corn-studded dirt.

The derrick, hidden behind panels of psychedelic flowers painted by terminally ill children (with some help from the god of irony), was part of the landscape for so long that no one paid it any mind. Each year, the oil company paid a 5 percent royalty fee—in other words, millions of dollars—to the school system and neighborhood residents, including Horowitz’s own family. Most people accepted it as an unequivocal good.

Until 300 former Beverly students got cancer.

In her new book, Parts Per Million, high on emotional appeal, intrigue, and extrapolation, Horowitz leaves no stone unturned. She exposes the complicated struggle between Big Oil and Big Lawsuits: Outraged parents send around petitions that many, refusing to believe, refuse to sign. A “neutral” expert gets fired when it’s revealed that her husband was an oil consultant. Lawyers “privilege” information. Erin Brockovich gets involved. (“It’s just butt-ass wrong,” says Brockovich, movingly, of the oil well.) Under the aegis of outspoken Persian soccer moms, race enters the picture. More cancers sprout.

Over a four-year period, Horowitz stitches together a story from excruciatingly annotated interviews with hundreds of alumni, government officials, activists, geologists, cancer patients, doctors, air-flow experts, and lawyers.

Sure, this book is about whether or not the oil wells under Beverly High caused more than a thousand cancers. But what it’s really about is greed—the oil company’s, the school system’s, the plaintiffs’, the lawyers’. It’s about how, nearly always, the winner in the American legal system is the party that pours out enough money to outlast the other, and just how much is spent in extenuated litigation. In this tale, every time court was summoned, $10,000 in lawyers’ fees were spent per hour.

The story is also about how much attention we should—or shouldn’t—pay to the ever more relevant issue of industrial contaminants. It’s about what happens when the burden of proof shifts from industry to government. And, when government shies away, the burden falls to a group of individuals, whom Horowitz calls, lovingly, “wacko soccer moms,” committed together by outrage, fear and loss.

Horowitz’s most interesting chapter, aside from the chilling transcriptions of conversations with her old high school teachers (“I’m getting tired of funerals, frankly,” says one), is the one in which she explores the myth that science is an objective discipline immune from market forces. “Environmental science has turned into a kind of warfare,” she notes, drawing parallels to tobacco industry research. Horowitz accuses the scientists working on this case of behaving like lawyers, working for whomever is willing to pay them the most: “The search for the truth in science and the truth in the courtroom are two completely different endeavors, defined by different standards of proof.”

Although the book implicitly addresses the consequences we may now be facing for our greed, Horowitz regrettably refrains from making conclusions that stretch beyond Beverly Hills High. Casting a wider net would have moved the book from exhaustive case study towards greater relevance.

Above all, Horowitz’s biggest frustration is that so far, no one has figured out “the full extent of contamination and what effects it has had on the health of the people—except for a plaintiffs’ law firm looking to win its case,” she writes resignedly. Scientific evidence is purchased and potted and parried with. The lawyers knock down each others’ straw men. Sure, one day, the judge will rule, one side will pay, the other receive. But, as quips one dying man, “the case will be settled but the truth won’t be.”
--Nathalie Jordi, Plentymag.Com

"DRIVING along Olympic Boulevard, past the Eiffel Tower-shaped oil pump next to Beverly Hills High School's athletic field, one could always muse about how fitting it was, in a social Darwinist sort of way, that one of the nation's richest public high schools sits on an oil field generating millions of dollars for an already wealthy school district and city. So unfair.

On the other hand, it always seemed a little bit creepy that such an industrial object -- never mind its ugly flower-power wrapping -- was whirring away in the middle of some of the most prized real estate in the country.

It was jarring, if not altogether unexpected in this age of environmental nervousness-bordering-on-neurosis, when, in 2003, news reports about the "poisonous oil wells" at Beverly Hills High began seeping out of the city, thanks in part to the recently minted environmental celebrity Erin Brockovich, who had begun investigating claims of an unusually high incidence of cancer among generations of students and teachers.

Brockovich, fresh off her Oscar triumph (well, technically, it was Julia Roberts' triumph), began sniffing around Beverly Hills High after meeting Lori Moss, a 1992 graduate who'd been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease and thyroid cancer. Brockovich sampled the school's air and soil and persuaded her lawyer boss, Ed Masry, that they had a good case. But the pair, famous for winning $333 million for the residents of Hinkley, Calif., after PG&E contaminated their drinking water with chromium-6, needed to find potential Beverly Hills High victims -- lots of them. The only way to do that quickly was to sound the alarm. One terrifying sweeps-week television news report later, an environmental health crisis was born. Lawsuits ensued.

Joy Horowitz, a freelance journalist, was assigned by Los Angeles magazine to write a story about the controversy. Her investigation led to "Parts Per Million," a very long, very complicated tale that is worth the slog.

Horowitz, sympathetic to those who believe their health was compromised by the fumes and oil residue that drifted across the school's track and into classrooms, comes to the story with unique credentials. She graduated from the school in 1971 and was struck at her 30th reunion by how many former classmates had cancer. Even more telling is her family's experience with cancer and lawsuits. Her father, she writes, "was the first American to successfully sue a cigarette company in a court of law." He died of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung usually caused by exposure to asbestos. He had smoked Kents, promoted as a " 'health' brand in the 1950s because of their Micronite filters. In fact, the filters were made of asbestos." Her parents taught her that making "the connection between cancer and environmental factors is not only possible -- it's imperative."

Chemical emissions from the Beverly Hills High pumping site and at a nearby plant in Century City include the carcinogen benzene. One environmental expert working for Brockovich and Masry, who died in 2005, reported that the incidence of Hodgkin's disease among Beverly High graduates from 1976 to 2000 was three times the rate one would expect to see among their peers. "In the world of toxic torts," writes Horowitz, "a doubling of the incidence is usually enough to prevail in court." (This was vigorously disputed by the defendants' experts.) Parents were torn. Some yanked their kids out of school. Some were outright hostile to the idea that the campus could be poisoning their children.

Horowitz set herself a yeoman's task. Toxic tort litigation is nasty, brutish and long, neither for the faint of heart nor the short of attention span. She spent three years interviewing students, teachers, parents, local and state politicians, school board members, lawyers for the alleged victims, lawyers for the defendant oil and energy companies. She talked to toxicologists, oncologists, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, petroleum engineers. She attended community meetings, City Hall meetings, school board meetings. She toured the drilling site and the Sempra facility (which, she writes, the EPA considers a "major source" of air pollution), and made Freedom of Information Act requests. (Release of information about any radioactive materials at the wells was denied, appallingly, by state health officials, who cited post-9/11 homeland security concerns.)

Although Horowitz comes up short in the proof department (not her fault; proof is elusive in cases such as these), she makes a compelling case that instead of making a genuine effort to discover whether emissions from drilling and energy production were harming the teenagers and teachers of Beverly Hills, the city and school district went into lawsuit mode. They seemed to be more interested in defending themselves than in learning the truth and, possibly, protecting the children and employees for whom they were responsible.

Partly, this is because the lawsuits forced the city and district into a defensive crouch. But there was also, Horowitz argues persuasively, a powerful incentive -- almost bigger than the millions of dollars in oil royalties that have flowed over the years to Beverly Hills and its schools -- to persuade the world that the city would never compromise the health of its children.

After all, the words "Beverly Hills" are shorthand for privilege, success and -- especially when it comes to children -- a pampered, nothing-but-the-best way of life; so the idea that generations of students had been exposed to toxic chemicals was a serious public relations problem for the city, the school district and Venoco Inc., which took over the drilling operation in 1995.

Horowitz's narrative sometimes gets lost in abstruse passages jam-packed with information about chemicals, oil drilling operations, scientific studies, regulatory agencies and how "facts" can be shaded to favor either side.

But along the way, she rewards the reader with fascinating nuggets. The women of California's Marin County, for instance, have the highest rate of breast cancer in the nation -- and the only risk factor identified so far is two glasses of wine or more a day.

Horowitz also briefly incorporates into her story a compelling -- and for my money, under-examined -- aspect of life in Beverly Hills, namely the tension between its relatively recent Persian immigrants and other city residents, which happened to surface among the anti-oil well PTA moms of the school who risked their social standing in the community when they joined forces to present a cohesive front, at least for a while.

Leaving aside whether links between the oil wells and the Sempra plant's hazardous emissions will ever be conclusively proven, Horowitz's book is also a primer on an important aspect of Los Angeles that most people don't think much about, if they ever knew it in the first place: The L.A. basin, she reminds us, sits on a series of oil fields, and California is the largest oil-producing state behind Alaska, Texas and Louisiana. Since 1900, 30,000 wells have been dug in the region, though today, only about 5,000 are in operation, including 15 at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles, 19 at Beverly Hills High School, 22 at the Rancho Park golf course and 40 next to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West L.A.

There is nothing pretty about drilling for oil, which is why back in the 1950s, the city of Los Angeles required disguising oil pumps in residential and business districts. But all the disguises in the world can't prevent leaks, escaping vapors and accidents. In 1979, Beverly Hills amended its municipal code outlawing oil drilling anywhere in the city -- except the high school.

Last year, a judge dismissed the first 12 toxic tort cases, ruling there was not enough evidence to establish that cancers were caused by the industrial operations on or near the school grounds. They are being appealed, and more are in the pipeline, as it were.

The lease agreement governing drilling at the school is due to expire in 2016. Meanwhile, oil extraction continues apace, as does the Century City operation, formerly owned by a Sempra Energy subsidiary, which, reports Horowitz, pays "emission fees" for releasing into the air such carcinogens as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and benzene.

There's no upbeat "Erin Brockovich"-style ending here. Answers to life-and-death questions turn out to be as elusive as the steam that wafts to this day over the playing fields and into the classrooms of perhaps the world's most famous high school."
-- Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times

"The alma mater of countless celebrities and the inspiration for iconic Hollywood productions from It’s a Wonderful Life to Beverly Hills, 90210, Beverly Hills High School may be the famous high school in America. It may also be the most dangerous. In Parts per Million, veteran reporter Joy Horowitz looks into why.

According to certain lawyers, public-health experts, and concerned laypeople, it has to do with oil: the school sits atop a field of it, and a private company has been pumping out millions of dollars worth of petroleum for decades. It’s also been sending some sizeable profits back to the city, school district, and homeowners of Beverly Hills—a lucrative arrangement that generally seemed to please the residents of this rich-and-proud city, at least until 2003, when “environmental champion” Erin Brockovich came to town “claiming… a connection between the cancers of a group of…graduates and the oil fields.” Parts per Million is Horowitz’s exhaustive account of the resulting (and ongoing) investigations and lawsuits. It encompasses Horowitz’s own background as an alumna of Beverly Hills High School, as well as a vast cast of characters, from Persian soccer moms to shady scientists, smug officials to tricky trial lawyers, cancer victims to citizen skeptics after the truth.

Even for those not overly interested in the politics of Beverly Hills (as one naysayer quoted in the book puts it, “only in…Beverly Hills can kids sit around…and complain about [an] oil well”), this riveting book reveals something crucially important: the US government doesn’t do nearly enough to protect its citizens from toxic chemicals’ harmful effects, which can range from headaches to reproductive problems to cancer and death. The “lesson” of Beverly Hills High School, and of Parts per Million, “is that something has gone terribly wrong—with our regulatory system, our legal system, and our political will.”
--MySpace Books