The Gentle Subversive
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation--including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry--and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact biography of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book.
Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed her love of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (a New York Times bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her "poison book": Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, women, and other concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losing battle with cancer.
Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964), an outspoken forerunner of the environmental movement and author of the National Book Award-winning The Sea Around Us (1951), is best known for her groundbreaking, highly controversial tome Silent Spring (1962), a scathing expose of the effects of DDT and other pesticides. In this brief, fascinating ecological biography by historian and fellow environmentalist Lytle, Carson's life is separated into four chapters?Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter-each focusing on the genesis, gestation and publication of Carson's four books. Lytle takes care in balancing his account, devoting equal attention to Carson's family life (for decades, Carson took care of her ailing mother, sister and nieces) as well as the arduous path of her career. Although she ultimately achieved wide recognition both as a writer and an ecologist, clearing the way for landmark environmental policy change, Carson endured staggering setbacks, including years of overcoming gender prejudice in a male-dominated field, her costly familial burden and several battles with recurring breast cancer?a fight she would ultimately lose at age 56. Lytle's spirited, thoroughly documented re-telling sheds ample light on the implications of this remarkable scientist's commitment to "protect the living things she loved so dearly." Photos.