Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was born on a family farm near
Springdale, Pennsylvania. She earned a master's in zoology at Johns
Hopkins before taking a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. She
published Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951,
winner of the National Book Award), and The Edge of the Sea (1955).
Silent Spring (1962), her exposé of the disastrous ecological
effects of pesticide use, was an international bestseller.
A research biologist and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber
was inspired to activism by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, becoming
one of America's leading environmental writers and antipollution
advocates. Her books include Living Downstream: An Ecologist's
Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), Having
Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (2001), and Raising
Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis
(2011).
"Carson's Sea Trilogy is as gratifying to read today as it
ever was. . . . Each book achieves that rare feat of popular
science: crafting a narrative so deceptively simple as to entice
readers in and, once there, enchant them enough to stay as much for
the prose as for the delicious morsels of data. . . . One cannot
help but think of Carson working late into the night, crafting her
perfect sentences with the precision of a jeweler. She was a
scientist, yes, but also a disciple of the sea. These books are
devotional works." —Scientific American
"The mysteries [Carson] pondered are oceans-deep, which is why her
sea books, all these years later, remain an inexhaustible treasure,
too." —The Wall Street Journal
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