Gehenna was hellish

Ancient Jerusalem's dumpsite was beyond the walls of the Old City in the Valley of Hinnom. In the days of the Judaean kings, according to the Bible, cults would go to the valley to sacrifice children to the pagan god Moloch. By Jesus' time, Hinnom was a foul dump full of rotting garbage, animal carcasses, and smoky, acrid fires. It was, in a word, hellish, which is why the valley's other name, Gehenna, came to stand for the name where sinners were tortured in the fires of eternal damnation.

Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam Books, 2014), p. 85

Specialized scavengers in 19th-century London

Variants survive today in slum-ridden megacities like Cairo, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires, but the epitome was early nineteenth-century London, where a scavenger army of tens of thousands of impoverished men, women, and children, each with a defined specialty, scavenged the dregs of the metropolis. There were toshers in the sewers and mudlarks on the riverbanks, rag-pickers atop rubbish heaps and bone-pickers behind kitchens. "Pure-finders" scooped up dog manure for tanneries, dustmen collected ash and night-soil men emptied cesspools. . . . Teeming cities like London and Paris could not have functioned without the ad hoc scavenging system, but the cost was very high. The scavengers worked in filth, and as the investigations of William Farr and John Snow demonstrated, filthy conditions were crucial in the spread of communicable disease.

Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam Books, 2014), p. 85

Outstanding example of the corporate passive voice

Behind its thick curtain of trees, Toms River Chemical was spending as little money on pollution control as it could. The company's executives had been explicit about this in 1968, according to an internal memo describing their reaction to a report on various waste treatment options: "After review of this report by top management, the policy of making these expenditures only as fast as absolutely necessary was stated."

Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam Books, 2014), p. 104