Pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson explores the wonders of the
Earth's oceans in these classics of American science and nature
writing.
Rachel Carson is perhaps most famous as the author of Silent Spring,
but she was first and foremost a poet of the sea and the three books
collected in this deluxe Library of America volume are classics of
American science and nature writing.
Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson's lyrical debut, offers an
intimate account of maritime ecology through the eyes of three of the
ocean's denizens, the individual lives of sanderling, mackerel, and eel
dramatically intertwined in the enduring ebb and flow of the tides.
The Sea Around Us (1951)--a winner of the National Book
Award--draws on a wealth of oceanographic, meteorological, biological,
and historical research to present its subject on a grand, biospheric
scale, revealing not only many mysteries of the still-unfathomed depths,
but a reverence for the sea as a source of global climate and of life
itself.
Concluding Carson's sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea (1955)
explores the habits of the many small creatures that live on shorelines
and in tidepools accessible to any beachcomber: part identification
guide, part hymn to ecological complexity, it is a book that conveys the
sense of wonder in nature for which Carson is justly celebrated.
At a moment when overfishing, pollution, and global warming are causing
catastrophic changes to marine environments worldwide, Carson's
lyrically detailed accounts of these environments offer a timely
reminder of their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for human
life.
