Under the Sea Wind

Before there was an Earth Day, before there was a global environmental movement, there was Rachel Carson (1907-64). This Pennsylvania-born zoologist and marine biologist galvanized opinion with her controversial 1962 book Silent Spring, an examination of pesticides that has been credited with the subsequent national ban on DDT. Silent Spring was a bestseller, but Carson's personal favorite among her books was Under the Sea-Wind, her first. Her sentiments didn't derive from the book's initial Released just a month before Pearl Harbor, this lyrical study of the shore and the open sea received sterling reviews but sold miserably. This welcome Penguin Classics reprise edition contains a fine introduction by prizewinning Carson biographer Linda Lear.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is considered one of the harbingers of the contemporary environmental movement thanks to her book Silent Spring, a prophetic warning about the misuse of chemical pesticides. Under the Sea-Wind was the first of her distinguished trilogy on the sea. It was followed by The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, and catapulted Carson to international fame as a nature writer. Coming Spring 2017, the PBS "American Experience" Documentary Rachel Carson.

Linda Lear (introducer) is an environmental historian and biographer and the author of the prize-winning study Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.