Silent Spring

Rating:
Summary: Prescient scientific literary achievment, now
Review: A score of years after Bhopal.

The elimination of DDT in the US but export of DDT to foriegn
countries is problematical,,,,...

the nesting eagle population was brought back indirectly by
Carson's work.

SOx NOx CO2 the later covered by Teapot Dome Energy Infrastructure,
following the world health organization to Korea,
the spirit of science for the people a blandishment
of satisfaction for the available dermatoid cyst
gastrocnemius siting for breakout.. the discovery
of Anopheles and homograft contained laboratories.

The briefcases and Parapluie of Cato's Republic and
the Congressional Memory Project.

Rating:
Summary: One of the scientific classics of its time
Review: Carson's slient spring is a well-written, heavily profound commentary on the dangers of Persistant Organic Pollutants (POPs) and their effects on every aspect of nature. Driving home point after point about different harms brought about by these chemicals, her study clearly earned the critical acclaim it has received over the last 40 years.
Her prose is extremely easy to follow for a technical book, and nearly anyone can read it. I am only mildly interested in science, and even less interested in ecology. However, I had no trouble grasping the concepts she brought up in her report. All of her anecdotes and evidence are presented in a manner simple enough for the layman but profound enough for the most educated professionals

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.