Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Those who know Carson (1907-1964) only as the author of Silent Spring, which raised America's consciousness about the environment and in particular about the negative effects of pesticides, will come away from this comprehensive biography not just with a deeper awareness of what made this woman tick but also with a more thorough understanding of how America's environmental policies evolved. Relying on Carson's extensive letters and on exhaustive interviews with various friends and colleagues, Lear, a research professor of environmental history at George Washington University, traces Carson's life in the most minute detail. We are flies on the wall as Carson, the youngest by far of three children, has her first experiences with nature under the careful tutelage of her mother. We watch as she struggles to overcome gender and social barriers. Carson spent much of her life, until her mid-life literary successes, either poor or the struggling breadwinner for poor relatives to follow her real passion, writing. We stand by as she finds love and solace later in life in the friendship of a married woman, Dorothy Freeman. It is a story that is at once inspirational and poignant. Carson's was no easy life, but she persevered, driven by a need to write and to illuminate the miraculous natural world to just plain folks. It is impossible to read of her trials and tribulations without being moved.

Library Journal

From childhood days, Carson loved nature while showing enormous promise as an author. In college, she began as an English major before switching to biology, and in her federal government job, she used her scientific training to write many publications. In 1951, Carson published her first best seller, The Sea Around Us. Ten years later, while fighting a losing battle with breast cancer, she published Silent Spring, which generated enormous controversy. Environmental historian Lear presents a mostly affectionate and satisfying portrait of Carson. An afterword with information on what happened to Carson's ward, Roger; her close friend Dorothy Freeman; and others would have been appreciated. Lear also fails to explore fully the contradictions in Carson's life, such as her willingness to abide familial manipulations while letting nothing stand in her way when working on a project. Nevertheless, this is an excellent treatment of a founder of modern environmentalism. Recommended. Randy Dykhuis, Michigan Lib. Consortium, Lansing

Booknews

A massive biography of the mother of modern environmentalist movements. Lear (environmental history, George Washington University) draws from previously unavailable sources and interviews with people who knew Carson (1907-64) to trace her evolution from a budding scientist first to a popular nature writer then to an activist. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Time

"[A] portrait of a gifted and courageous woman who helped redefine the way humans look at their place in nature."

Kirkus Reviews

A sweeping, analytic, first-class biography of Rachel Carson from Lear (Environmental History/George Washington Univ.).

Carson may have had a forceful mother, may have grown up in iron-and-steel Pittsburgh (thus getting an early introduction to foul air), had one storied intellectual mentor after another, toiled in the trenches of the Fish and Wildlife Service for many years; but important as all this may have been in shaping her vision of the natural world—and these moments are given their due, as this book is formidably detailed—Lear concentrates her efforts on Carson the writer, both of books (Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and, of course, Silent Spring) and of a wealth of magazine articles, where Carson was convinced she would make enough money to devote herself to full-time writing. Carson understood that she had the enviable ability to combine a scientific background with a liquid prose style to communicate the workings of our mysterious, intricate living world with passion, speaking not just to the converted but to the sprawling, educated, postwar middle class. Though intensely private, she was also shrewdly aware of how best to mix magazine serial rights with book publication dates, how to get in the running for various awards and prizes. Lear fleshes out the portrait with Carson's friends, agent, and publishers; her tumultuous family life; her myriad illnesses (including the cancer that killed her); and how, in characteristic nonconformist fashion, Carson held tight to her femininity in the masculine world of nature writing.

Though not infrequently starstruck by her subject, Lear provides enough anecdotes, and intelligently overviews the genesis and guiding currents of Carson's work, to make her reverence appear a natural response. Call this biography definitive.

Children's Literature

In 1962 Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published. This stunning book detailed the effects of pesticides and pollution on birds and the environment as a whole. Carson's book became controversial but ultimately the calling card of what has become the environmental movement. As Lear shows in this definitive biography, Rachel Carson was a complex and multifaceted person. Born at a time when women were rarely part of advanced scientific studies, Carson made her way in a male-dominated field. Born into a family that provided her the opportunities to gain a love of nature's complexities, Carson took those energies and channeled them into her work. This combination of Carson's innate talent and dogged desire to tell a story that needed to be told about the devastation of the environment led to a monumental contribution on her part. In the end, Rachel Carson's work set the stage for the increased awareness in the public that helped enact legislation and changed the way many people viewed their place in the natural world. In her biographical work, Lear does justice to both her subject and the work that Rachel Carson undertook during her all-too-brief life. Reviewer: Greg M. Romaneck