Back

Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson" by William Souder (2012).

Excerpts from the publisher's description:

"Rachel Carson loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Silent Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and other pesticides... It was Carson who sifted through all the evidence, documenting with alarming clarity the collateral damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife; revealing the effects of these new chemicals to be lasting, widespread, and lethal....Carson opened a fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the more urgent new concept of environmentalism...."
"...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 new biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century."

I love Carson's trilogy of sea and shore nature books, wonderful repeat re-reads. But it was her darkly hard-hitting "Silent Spring" which changed the world and made her one of my heroes.

Link to book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/170448/on-a-farther-shore-by-william-souder/