A PLAGUE OF FROGS: The Horrifying True Story.

• Author: McKibben, Bill
• Position: Review

A PLAGUE OF FORGS: The Horrifying True Story by William Souder Hyperion, $23.95

THIS IS A REVEALING AND important book, and you should begin by ignoring the subtitle. Something tells me it wasn't the author's choice: In fact, he's done a remarkably sober and meticulous job of following a story that's been misreported in almost every newspaper and on every TV station in the country. By book's end, it remains largely unclear what causes frog deformities and exactly how worried we should be about them--but we've instead been treated to a remarkable inside look at science trying to grapple with horribly complicated real-world problems.

In the summer of 1995, eight junior high school students on a field trip discovered a small pond on a Minnesota farm where a great many leopard frogs were missing their hind legs. They called the state government, stories began to appear in the newspapers, and soon Minnesota's environmental agency had a map showing similar reports from almost every county in the state. Other such sites began to show up across the Great Lakes region; a Canadian researcher announced that the same trend was evident in Quebec. What did it all mean? No one knew for sure, because no one knew if deformed frogs were rare, or what might cause the deformities, or if that unknown agent might harm humans as well. It was a scientific puzzle, and a particularly difficult one. A pond is filled with water; it's hard to break down that water into its thousands of different compounds and figure out if one of them is, in fact, a poison.

And it's here that William Souder, a freelance journalist living in the region where the first frogs were found, really rolls up his sleeves and goes to work. Instead of "covering" the story with a few calls to bureaucrats, he digs in for the long haul, traveling to a long series of small scientific meetings, talking almost daily with the principal investigators, and watching as the science develops.

Though the book is not judgmental, it's abundantly clear whom he respects and whom he doesn't. The state bureaucracy clearly manages to mishandle the case at almost every turn; one lesson this book teaches is that, at least in what amounts to an epidemiological investigation, you can have too much decentralization. You really want people for whom such an outbreak is not a once-in-a-lifetime event. The EPA comes off a little better, though its penchant for chasing trendy topics is clear. And unknown federal agencies like...