Lost Woods
The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Discover the previously uncollected works of the author of the environmental classic Silent Spring—considered one of the best nature writers of the 20th century.
"Lyric, descriptive, informative, and moving."—The New York Times
When Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964, her four books, including the environmental classic Silent Spring, had made her one of the most famous people in America. This anthology of previously uncollected writings is a priceless addition to our knowledge of Rachel Carson, her affinity with the natural world, and her life.
Featuring nature writing, speeches, field notebook passages, and letters, this collection is an invaluable insight to Carson's thought and philosophy and a treasure trove for environmentalists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If fleeting sketches can sometimes say more than the fully realized work, this collection of journal entries, a TV script, speeches and articles by one of the pioneers of the modern environmental movement gracefully delivers. Pieces on the destruction of unique island eco-systems, the connection of music to nature and environmental "managed care" of waterfowl refuges offer sad testament to Carson's range, never to be further explored due to her early death from breast cancer, in 1964. Written with mesmeric intensity, Carson's first piece of published adult work, "Undersea," was accepted by the Atlantic in 1935. Reprinted here, it reveals her lasting obsession not only with the sea but with the antiquity and majestic continuity of life on earth. Her other famous passion, exposing the ravaging effects of pesticides, which was devastatingly depicted in her 1962 classic, Silent Spring, is defended here in a speech that marks the maturity of her voice. Highly informed and occasionally withering, this refutation of her big-business critics reveals the nasty arena she felt forced to enter. In other speeches, Carson, a trained biologist, laments the perceived distance between science and a language that can touch nonscientific people. For a TV script on the subject of clouds, she states, in a delicate synthesis of fact and poetry, "They are the writing of the wind on the sky." The careful gathering of fragments by Lear (author of the 1997 biography Rachel Carson), if presented a little too reverently, gives rare glimpses of Carson's personal vulnerability and of her strange fusion of restraint and fervor, offering a frequent sense of being in Carson's company.
