title: Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy
author:  Nancy A. Nichols 
description: In 1992, Nichols' beloved elder sister was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer. On her deathbed, she makes Nichols, already a journalist, promise to write about her illness and what the two of them suspected might be the cause of it: massive pollution in their hometown of Waukegen, Ill., on the shore of Lake Michigan. In the midst of working on the book, Nichols received her own diagnosis-she also has a rare form of cancer which requires aggressive treatment. "My story was my sister's once over," she writes. Nichols constructs a fast-moving, urgent narrative that catalogues the evidence of the many different forms of pollution and the likelihood that they contributed to the cancers, documenting the choices and treatment she must face as a cancer patient. There is also, inevitably, a prosecutorial tone and a barely suppressed sense of outrage that such reckless pollution could be allowed to happen. Even if, as she explains, the facts that what she uncovers wouldn't stand up in court, the book still bears witness to both her own and her sister's trials. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Mothers and daughters, sisters and cousins, they lived for summers at the lake
  house until a tragic accident changed everything. The Summer That Made Us is
  an unforgettable story about a family learning to accept the past, to forgive
  and to love each other again.
  
  
  That was then...
  
  
  For the Hempsteads, two sisters who married two brothers and had three
  daughters each, summers were idyllic. The women would escape the city the
  moment school was out to gather at the family house on Lake Waseka. The lake
  was a magical place, a haven where they were happy and carefree. All of their
  problems drifted away as the days passed in sun-dappled contentment. Until the
  summer that changed everything.
  
  
  This is now...
  
  
  After an accidental drowning turned the lake house into a site of tragedy and
  grief, it was closed up. For good. Torn apart, none of the Hempstead women
  speak of what happened that summer, and relationships between them are uneasy
  at best to hurtful at worst. B