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The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
Crown
September 2012
On Sale: September 4, 2012
Featuring: Rachel Carson
512 pages ISBN: 030746220X EAN: 9780307462206 Kindle: B007MGSNQI Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal
book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new
portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental
movement She loved the ocean and wrote three books
about its mysteries, including the international bestseller
The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book,
Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist
transformed our relationship with the natural
world. Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring
in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic
pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical
onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a
Nobel Prize for its discovery. Effective against crop pests
as well as insects that transmitted human diseases such as
typhus and malaria, DDT had at first appeared safe. But as
its use expanded, alarming reports surfaced of collateral
damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife. Silent
Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and its effects,
which were lasting, widespread, and lethal. Published
in 1962, Silent Spring shocked the public and forced
the government to take action-despite a withering attack on
Carson from the chemicals industry. The book awakened the
world to the heedless contamination of the environment and
eventually led to the establishment of the EPA and to the
banning of DDT and a host of related pesticides. By drawing
frightening parallels between dangerous chemicals and the
then-pervasive fallout from nuclear testing, Carson opened a
fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the
more urgent new concept of environmentalism. Elegantly
written and meticulously researched, On a Farther
Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in
the natural world than in the literary one that embraced
her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson's
romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of her death
from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary new biography
captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the
twentieth century.
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