Reviews for Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight to Save the Bays

The average rating for Nobody Particular: One Woman's Fight to Save the Bays based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-16 00:00:00 Freeman Rawdon This is a particularly good title for women's history month. Diane Wilson is a tough lady who put everything she had (including her life, via hunger strike) on the line to ensure that plastics plants on her local Texas bay committed to zero pollution discharge from their plants. It's not a total victory story, and the frustrations that she must have felt are keenly communicated through the text. The format is nice--somewhere between picture book and graphic novel. Although each page has a panel that is sometimes split into sequential panels with word balloons, they are also displayed on full-page illustrations of the bay with asides about how the ecosystem is affected by industrial wastewater, which gives the whole thing an either/or feel. And it works. It's a complex story about many many attempts by Wilson and her lawyer (alone and together) to negotiate and/or confront the companies and figure out the intracacies of the law and the real waste output. The format and clear line of plot goes a long way towards making it all understandable--even though there are several layers to the text: the picture book layer, the first person sort of oral history "by" Wilson, and the conversations happening in the word bubbles. More people should know about Diane Wilson's fight. It shows that one person can have a big impact on their community, to help the world survive. Imagine if there were 5 more people like her? Also, she raises a lot of tough questions about the cost of her (and, by association, our) modern lives. I hope this book is widely read and has an impact on its readers.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-08 00:00:00 Dorothy Smith Molly Bang uses a unique graphic novel and collage style to tell the story of Diane Wilson's fight in the Gulf of Texas as they fight corporate polluter's such as Alcoa and Formasa. The story is affecting and important but in the post-script it appears that despite all the court cases and other agreement's struck, corporate pollution continues unabated.