On a Farther Shore by William Souder

On a Farther Shore by William Souder

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the modern 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 DT, 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, DT 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 DT 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 Environmental Protection Agency and to the banning of DT 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 Carson's death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century.

William Souder is the author of three books, including Under a Wild Sky and On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. He lives in Grant, MN.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307462213
ISBN 10	0307462218
Title	On a Farther Shore
Author	William Souder
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc)
Year published	2013-09-03
Number of pages	528
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.