Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power »

Mark Schapiro is editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. He has written extensively on foreign affairs and his work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and other publications, and he has reported stories for Frontline, NOW with Bill Moyers, and public radio's Marketplace. Schapiro lives in San Francisco, California.

In contrast to America's corporate-hostage government, the European Union is charting a new path that, by requiring safe products, is revamping how industry can work and succeed. Schapiro takes the reader inside a global power shift that has gone almost wholly unreported in the United States. He shines a light on Europe's evolving search for higher safety and environmental standards that has allowed Brussels, and not Washington, to emerge as the leader in global market innovation in the twenty-first century. Exposed shows that, short of strong government intervention, America will lose whatever claim it has to commercial supremacy. Increasingly, its products are equated with serious health hazards, the same hazards that the European Parliament is legislating out of existence in its powerful trading block. From South America to China, the world's governments and industrial leaders are looking to Europe's leadership as the products of the twenty-first century are invented, designed, produced, and marketed.

Schapiro's revelations will spark a sea change in the way American consumers think about everyday products from plastic softeners that can contribute to sexual malformations to lipstick additives that are potential toxins to the brain, liver, kidneys, and immune system. And it will change our view of the future of environmentalism and the roles government can play in protecting us from hidden dangers.