Rating: 
Summary: Another Thoreau
Review: Rachel Carson wrote so beautifully that any few pages of SILENT SPRING, or its predecessor, the majestic THE SEA AROUND US, throb with the vitality and yearning of the greatest poetry. SILENT SPRING caused an enormous sensation forty years ago, as it married a highly evolved lyric writing style with a hardcore expose of DDT and other insecticides, a topic which was quite flammable and which provoked the wrath of a host of leading scientists and others invested in the big business of "nature cleansing." To some, Carson was a renegade, and a retro one at that, a conservative who wished to take the world back to the days before "scientific progress."
As many conservationists have been called before and since. But conservation does not automatically imply "conservative," and I think Carson, in her own way, was quite radical in her thinking and in her prognosis for the future. This book is lovely, but to my mind not well served by the insipid introduction by Terry Tempest Williams who is an OK writer but nothing special, particularly when compared to Carson. My advice is, skip the intro, you don't need it, and get right to the heart of the book and the wonderful limpid prose, the most evocative since Thoreau's.
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