A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
Published 1995 · 130,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Law, Mystery & Crime, Nonfiction
How hard is A Civil Action to read?
A Civil Action scores 23 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Legal and scientific terminology explained in context.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Concrete case narrative with systemic implications.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with legal procedure, scientific evidence, and personal detail.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Mostly chronological with flashbacks to the contamination.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The lawsuit as symbol of justice's imperfections.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The gap between justice sought and justice delivered is devastating.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The settlement is ambiguous. True accountability never arrives.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Multiple timelines weaving legal and human narratives.
How A Civil Action is regarded
A Civil Action holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.