Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

Lear, Linda. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, is often heralded as being the catalyst for the environmental movement in the United States. Linda Lear’s biography of Rachel Carson (1907–1964) revisits her early years as an aspiring writer and her decision to study the biological sciences as a young woman. Having received a masters degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University, Carson secured a position with the US Bureau of Fisheries as a scientist and editor. Owing to the success of The Sea Around Us (1951), the second book of what became known as her sea trilogy, Rachel Carson was able to resign from government service in 1952 and devote herself to writing. Turning to the final decade of Carson’s life, Lear chronicles the events that led up to the publication of Silent Spring, and how Carson dealt with being thrust once again into the public and, this time, political limelight. The biography was republished by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in 2009.