When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

–Albert Camus, The Plague (translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert)

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power by Mark Shapiro (Chelsea Green, 2008)

At Google Book Search | excerpt at PBS | publisher’s page

From the publisher:

Thanks to the successful lobbying efforts of the U.S. chemical industry, Americans are being exposed to an array of environmental and health hazards—including rising rates of infertility, endocrine system disruptions, neurological disorders, and cancer—from which many others around the world are being protected.

In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, award-winning investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reveals how products on American shelves are increasingly being linked with serious health hazards—hazards, like Bisphenol A (BPA) and plastic softening phthalates, that the European Union is leading the rest of the world in legislating out of existence.

Schapiro takes the reader inside the global power shift that has gone almost wholly unreported in the United States, exposing not only the health and environmental consequences of this shift, but its implications for the American economy. He demonstrates how the environmental progress underway in Europe is prompting innovation and enabling their firms to beat American companies in the global competition for markets—markets that are becoming increasingly sensitive to environmental and health concerns.

As the Obama administration considers options for reform, Schapiro also demonstrates that what’s already happening in the world’s largest single market may suggest a route out of America’s long-lasting, and dangerous, status quo.

See also: What’s In This Stuff?: The Hidden Toxins in Everyday Products - and What You Can Do About Them

Audio and photos of Morrissey reading a passage from Within a Budding Grove (aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), the second volume of In Search of Lost Time:

Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door, those few steps which no one now could prevent my taking, I took with delight, with prudence, as though plunged into a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had been gently displacing the liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of absolute power, and of entering at length into an inheritance which had belonged to me from all time.

This was at a show by Howard Devoto’s Luxuria, whose song “Mlle” opens with the original French version of this passage.

{Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog}