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Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – review

R achel Carson educated a planet: her book The Sea Around Us was a runaway bestseller from 1951, and I remember it affectionately as the beginning of my science instruction. You wouldn't consult it now: for her the planet was only 2.5bn years old and the moon was made of granite from the floor of what is now the Pacific Ocean, torn away from the molten, nascent Earth in some early tidal cataclysm.

At the time, exploration of the deep ocean had hardly begun. Scuba technology was in its infancy, the remotely operated submersible not even a fantasy. Space exploration was still a daydream; continental drift and sea-floor spreading a preposterous heresy. So her book was one of the goads that spurred on the next generation of oceanographers and marine biologists. In 1962, already dying of cancer, she published Silent Spring .

If you had to choose one text by one person as the cornerstone of the conservation movement, the signal for politically savvy environmental activism, and the beacon of worldwide lay awareness of ecological systems, Silent Spring would be most people's clear choice. Its impact was immediate, far-reaching and ultimately life-enhancing: it earned her a posthumous presidential medal and put her face on the 17 cent US postage stamp. It also earned her sustained vitriolic assault from the chemical industry and a claim from a former US Secretary of Agriculture that (because she was unmarried) she was "probably a communist": this, in a McCarthyite world, was almost the ultimate in character assassination.

But how does it read now?

It is brilliantly written: clear, controlled and authoritative; with confident poetical flourishes that suddenly illuminate pages of cool exposition. The pesticide residues in US drainage systems are unexpectedly counterpointed with "the sight and sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an evening sky." Soil bacteria and fungi become a "horde of minute but ceaselessly toiling creatures".

Analysis of the incidental damage attendant upon agribusiness spraying gives way to an impassioned question: "Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by insects, and in the other, the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poison?"

Her use of imagery and emotion is almost perfectly judged. She keeps her anger under control and simply marshals the tragedy that requires no comment. "In Florida, two children found an empty bag and used it to repair a swing. Shortly thereafter both of them died and three of their playmates became ill. The bag had once contained an insecticide called parathion, one of the organic phosphates; tests established death by parathion poisoning."

Most of the time, she lets the information do the work, and confines her poetic urges to chapter headings and the odd, throwaway conclusion. The book is a study in how to put an argument and win it.

It was, in its time, and to some extent is still, a terrific teaching text. It must have been one of the first truly popular books to introduce the ideas of the food chain, and of the amplification of enduring chemical residues; of ecological interdependence and the web of life on Earth; of the intricate workings of the cell and the potential for catastrophic intrusion at the level of the molecule; of the balance of predator-prey relationships and the folly of blundering interference.

It is also – although this can hardly have been what she intended – a brilliant critique of free-market capitalism, in which chemical companies concerned only with the balance sheet could persuade government and big business to dust and spray the US mainland with costly, persistent and highly toxic products that bore minimal, and sometimes barely visible, warnings of risk to health; in which research into the consequences of chemical overkill was barely funded, if at all; and in which alternative approaches – among them, biological control – were dismissed because nobody (except perhaps the misinformed farmer and the trusting consumer) would profit from them.

Finally, of course, it must be on its own terms one of the most effective books ever written. Many of the organochlorines and organophosphates at the heart of her story are now banned, difficult to find or used only under tightly controlled circumstances; there are now networks of amateur and professional naturalists monitoring the state of the wild things in every developed country; trout and salmon have returned to once devastated rivers; there are vociferous citizens' groups and environmental awareness campaigners; industry in the rich world has been held to account and forced to clean up its act; and most governments have environmental legislation and inspectorates.

There are now even voices that argue that the world overreacted , and that DDT – the most notorious of the sprays, although perhaps not the most dangerous - in its way, was a useful chemical under the right circumstances.

But – because it was so successful – Silent Spring can now be read without cold anger, fear or horror: three emotions that must have worked so powerfully for this success. The impact is, in all senses, stunning: someone now reading this chronicle of selected devastation (most of the evidence is from mainland America) is likely to feel dulled insensible by the repeated bludgeon blows of bleak observation, grim anecdote and sickening illustration.

In Rachel Carson's late fifties America, eggs grow cold in the nest, songbirds are silent, raptors lie dead in the meadows; fish float dead in their thousands downstream; roadside foliage turns brown and withers; cattle sicken; fruitpickers collapse with shock after a day in the orchards; physicians, householders, mothers and children fall mysteriously ill, experience partial paralysis, and slowly waste away.

Paradoxically, this was also the America of Walt Disney and Fred Astaire; of Norman Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post; of homespun decency, rock'n'roll and the music of Aaron Copeland; of the Beat poets and the Kennedy campaign for the presidency and a new Camelot in Washington; a happy, confident place – although you might not know it from reading Silent Spring.

This was a profoundly important book. It remains an example of a very good book. It has earned a sure place in history and is a reminder that complacency is a dangerous state; that all human commerce has consequences that must be considered carefully; and that watchfulness is democracy's surest defence. It has been on my shelves for decades. But to be honest, although I began rereading with delight, I was relieved to get to the end of it: awful warnings have a way of making you feel awfully low-spirited.

Tim Radford 's geographical reflection, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things is published by Fourth Estate

Next up: Starting on 7 November we will review all the shortlisted titles for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in the runup to the announcement of a winner on 17 November. There will be a Guardian competition to win all six shortlisted titles – details to follow.

The shortlist

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean The Wavewatcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample The Rough Guide to the Future by Jon Turney

Agriculture
Science book club
Science and nature books
Conservation

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Book review: Silent Spring – Rachel Carson (1962)

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is as groundbreaking, controversial and relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1962.

The book argues that uncontrolled and unexamined pesticide use harms and even kills not only animals and birds, but also humans. Carson documents the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment.

The text includes strong accusations against the chemical industry and a call to look at how the use of chemicals can cause damage and impact the world around us. Carson successfully demonstrates the fragility of the biodiversity on the planet and emphasises how chemical use can have a large repercussions.

Silent Spring has been credited with launching the contemporary American environmental movement. It has been widely read and pointed out concerns around the use of pesticides and the pollution of the environment.

Since publication, Silent Spring has created a debate among critics and supporters bringing the issues discussed to the forefront and allowing people to get involved and gain additional insight. Whilst parts of the book are now outdated, science has expand on the thesis and research in Silent Spring allowing readers to broaden their knowledge.

It was originally published as a series of articles and as a result seems a little disjointed at times, with some sections being isolated.

However, the fundamental point is that Silent Spring is a well written and inspiring call to action, and deserves its status as one of the seminal texts of the environmental movement.

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What environmental progress looked like in America, not so long ago

Douglas brinkley describes a time, from 1960 to 1973, when americans became alarmed by pollution and other problems — and trusted the government to fix them.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently declared that the Earth was on “a highway to climate hell.” In “ Silent Spring Revolution ,” a panoramic history of environmental politics from 1960 to 1973, Douglas Brinkley describes a more hopeful age when awareness of ecological degradation was rising and government and activists were recognizing the need to act together to save the nation’s natural resources and defend the public’s health. Rather than take readers on a path to a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, Brinkley’s book recounts a decade-plus in which liberal action tackled some of the forerunners to our current environmental crises. The narrative captures an extended moment when the federal government implemented a host of laws, rules and regulations to protect rivers, seashores, oceans, parks, the air and wildlife. It was an era when a united effort established the public protections that remain in force today, even if entrenched climate deniers now hinder significant progress in meeting the challenges.

During the 1960s and ’70s, environmental problems demanded national attention. Crises were metastasizing, threatening the lives of Americans and endangering what President John Kennedy called “America the beautiful” during a conservation tour in September 1963. After JFK’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson took up the mantle, warning Americans on his way to a landslide election victory in 1964: “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.”

Unrestrained consumption, technological wizardry and unchecked growth were assaulting the nation’s natural resources. During the early Cold War, ecologically minded citizens, Brinkley writes in his absorbing account, were “shouting into a maelstrom of commercialism.” President Dwight Eisenhower established the interstate highway system in 1956, a step that virtually guaranteed an emissions-heavy future. Federally controlled nuclear testing in Nevada put strontium-90, radioactive isotopes, into the nation’s rivers and soil, while the Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a dam-building spree that provided hydroelectric power to Westerners living in newly built suburbs but also destroyed rivers and habitats. DDT, a chemical spray used to kill crop-eating pests, was ubiquitous. (One university scientist, so sure that DDT was benign, at the beginning of each term’s class poured the chemical in his coffee and drank it in front of a roomful of students, Brinkley reports.)

“Silent Spring Revolution” is the third in a trilogy of books by Brinkley examining the intersection of presidential leadership and environmental politics; the first two covered Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In this last volume, the most intriguing theme — and the reason the politics here seem so distant from our own — is the way that activists formed connections with presidents, environmental scientists and lawyers to build a nascent eco-consciousness. The result was a mass movement demanding vast changes in the nation’s environmental laws and attitudes, a movement to defend “the entire system of life on earth.” In contrast to our own time, this “protoenvironmentalism” wedded a politics of idealism to expansive notions of nonmaterialistic progress; a faith in the federal government to act responsibly in the national interest dovetailed with a liberal pragmatism. This movement was unapologetically pro-government, pro-science, pro-facts, and it revered nature as a spiritual home. Activism on the ground and leadership at the top defined these years, and often, the roles of politician and activist became indistinguishable.

The results were impressive. Raised in the sagebrush town of St. Johns, Ariz., and fond of “a rugged outdoors life,” Stewart Udall used his time as interior secretary from 1961 to 1969 to help create 64 new national park areas, a record sum. Richard Nixon’s chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, Russell Train, was an expert on flora and fauna and a former director of the World Wildlife Fund who fell in love with wildlife while on safaris in Africa. Train became an “endangered species zealot,” shepherding landmark reforms into law during the early 1970s. Rachel Carson was the unofficial leader of them all, an ecologist whose brilliant prose, scientific precision and Thoreau-like spiritualism enabled the publication of her blockbuster book “ Silent Spring ” in 1962, exposing DDT as toxic to human health and revolutionizing how many Americans regarded their relationship to the natural world.

American culture became more attuned to the process of degradation during the 1960s. Organizations such as the Sierra Club; the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE (and opposed to nuclear testing); and others massed protests against foul rivers and despoiled forests and polluted air. They drew the news media’s attention to environmental causes. At the same time, many Republican and Democratic leaders used their personal experiences as a springboard for environmental action. The Kennedys adored the ocean; the Johnsons loved the Texas Hill Country. Nixon, a California native, devoted one-third of his 1970 State of the Union address to environmental themes.

During the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, a set of reforms came into being, establishing laws, rules and agencies as a defense against growing ecological threats. These steps yielded real progress. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty eliminated atmospheric nuclear testing. The U.S. government reversed itself and virtually abolished the use of DDT and other cancer-causing pesticides.

The combined record of three very different presidents is stunning, especially in light of today’s relative paralysis in the face of climate change. Taken together, JFK, LBJ and Nixon won passage of and signed into law the Water Quality Act, the Highway Beautification Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Wilderness Preservation System and multiple endangered-species laws. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 200 national wildlife refuges, and national parks and many national seashores were all established during their tenures. And that’s just a partial list of the environmental wins from that era.

Many Americans came to understand that protecting the environment was important not only to maintain the country’s natural beauty but also to protect their health, the economy and access to recreation. Brinkley’s book is a useful reminder that many Americans viewed the federal government as a reliable ally that traded in facts, championed science and enacted common-sense regulations to protect the planet. “Silent Spring Revolution” also reads as a paean to the individuals, movements and politicians who saw federal intervention as the necessary solution to address the myriad environmental crises triggered by the modern industrial system.

There are a few off-key notes. The book paints Big Oil and other large polluters, along with some government agencies, with a flat brush; these private- and public-sector entities are described simply as pro-pollution. One wonders if there were voices of dissent in the private sector, or how chief executives responded to the environmentalists with anything other than recalcitrance. At times, puzzles remain unanswered. The left criticized LBJ’s war in Vietnam as both a human and ecological catastrophe, but it’s not clear how Johnson attempted to square his brilliant record of environmental protection at home with his desecration of the natural resources of Vietnam. Robert F. Kennedy is depicted as a whitewater-rafting enthusiast and steward of the planet. His son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who makes a minor appearance in these pages, became an environmental lawyer and activist but later took on a role as a leading anti-science, anti-vaccine voice, an evolution that isn’t mentioned in the book.

Overall, “Silent Spring Revolution” is an impassioned narrative that transports readers to a different, more optimistic world of popular support for eco-awareness and collective action. It is a book that sticks with you. By rendering a time when citizens believed in the nation’s ability to respond to environmental crises with smart national policies, and by portraying the federal government as a pro-planetary powerhouse, Brinkley’s book implies that the “highway to climate hell” is far from our only choice.

Matthew Dallek is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University. His book “ Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right ,” will be published in March.

Silent Spring Revolution

John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening

By Douglas Brinkley

Harper. 857 pp. $40

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Book Review: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on writing reviews for books that are newly released, or about to be released. That is not my goal here. My goal is to tell you about books that hold importance in our lives, whether it is health related, or other important information that we should all know, regardless of when the book was written. In this case, the book Silent Spring offers a great deal of important information that is just as prudent to be aware of today (if not more so). Yet it was written in 1962.

Sadly, I had never heard of Rachel Carson until one day, while I was arguing (ahem, having a discussion) with a county employee about my right to know about their public herbicide spraying, and their right to collect a paycheck for spraying my road with herbicides (long story for another time). It was when he made a joke about me and how I’m “going to be the next Rachel Carson” that stopped me in my tracks. Why didn’t I know who this Rachel Carson was that he was referring to, and why was it funny to him to compare me to her? (Keep in mind I took a conservation biology course in college, and still I had never heard of Rachel Carson. Pathetic.)

I went on a rampage, and after reading her book Silent Spring – I was furious. Not for the accusation, but for the idea that such a scenario would be funny! Worse yet, I could not figure out how he knew of this author and her work, and yet still continued to spray. Had not anyone working in that county office actually read her books? Only a deeply psychologically sick or insane person would continue widespread herbicide use after reading her book, and then make a joke about it.

It is not funny to recognize an issue in our society, culture, and attitudes, that will ultimately lead us down the road of potential cancer, infertility, and collective suicide. Not funny at all.

We all have to die of something you say? I say I disagree. I can choose to avoid dying a horrible and physically painful death, while my family suffers emotionally. I can choose to extend my life via the scientific knowledge that is already widely available, yet swept under the proverbial rug. I can choose to prevent falling into bankruptcy through unbelievable doctor bills, and un-affordable hospital bills. I can do my best to not pass on such debts to my family. I can do this all very simply, by choosing products that have scientific evidence that they are safe to use. Not “safe to use” under questionable and tenuous EPA, FDA, or OSHA “exposure limits,” but safe to use period.

Oh, and by the way, Rachel Carson had breast cancer, and the radiation treatment she was undergoing weakened her body to such a state that she developed anemia and ultimately died of a heart attack. This was just two years after this book was published. She was one month shy of 57 years old. The irony is beyond statement here.

But off my soap box and back to the book. This book was published in 1962, and I’m sure it took Rachel Carson years to write it. So we’ve had all this knowledge for all these decades and what have we done with it? NOTHING.

Ignorant people who only care about a paycheck are still spraying toxic chemicals on farms, on ranches, on roadways, and in parks. Naive people who think that just because the label says a product is “safe,” never consider the consequences of their actions when these herbicides and pesticides move into rivers, lakes, and soil. Do these people think that these poisonous chemicals (yes they are poisons) just somehow magically disappear from the environment? Depending on their properties, sometimes they do disappear; they are washed by the rain into lakes, streams, rivers, and fields. But while they may be temporarily diluted, they do not go away, at least not quickly. So continued use leads to accumulation, both in the environment and the animals and plants that live there. Consequently the fisherman brings contaminated fish to the table, and the hunter brings contaminated deer to the table, or the unsuspecting average person who buys food at the grocery store is putting those very same chemicals into their body and those of their family members. Yet no one seems to be questioning where these claims that these chemicals are “safe” are coming from. No one is even looking at the producers of these chemicals who use marketing ploys to make people think we need these chemicals. (Note: there are alternative methods to address these problems.)

Ok, so maybe “nothing” is being melodramatic. DDT was banned, and the EPA was formed.(Though honestly, I’m not really sure that the EPA does much that’s useful, considering that things like PFOS s, PFOA s, and phalates are still being massively produced by industry, as our world and everyone in it is dying. And let’s not forget that toxic herbicides like glyphosate and atrazine are still in widespread use today.) So nothing didn’t happen, but not enough happened. NOT ENOUGH.

How sickening. We have this knowledge and we do little with it. We’ve had this knowledge for 60 years now and the producers of these toxic chemicals could care less about the long term destruction of human life, and of much life on earth. Yet the same marketing claims and disinformation is going on today, 60 years after clear scientific knowledge of the consequences is publicized. They say knowledge is power, but that is not really true. Applied knowledge is power, and I’m f eeling quite powerless about this problem. This knowledge is not useful if I’m the only who has read the book. So pick up a copy, or listen to it on audiobook, and educate yourself on what is really going on. Something has to change.

One thing we can do is focus on buying organic foods that have not been exposed to these poisons (or minimally so). If regulators won’t do their jobs, at least we can exert consumer purchasing power in the marketplace. As always, vote with your wallets!

And shame on my conservation biology instructor for never introducing me to this author when I was in college.

Rachel Carson, 1940 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee photo

Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

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How Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ Awakened the World to Environmental Peril

By: Cate Lineberry

Updated: April 22, 2022 | Original: April 20, 2022

How Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' Galvanized the Environmental Movement

When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in September 1962, she was already a celebrated American biologist and author best known for her trilogy of lyrical books on the ocean. But rather than introducing readers to more of the natural world, the mild-mannered 55-year-old’s latest book warned they could be destroying it.

In what she referred to as her “poison book,” Carson revealed the damaging effects of the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides on the environment. She focused mainly on the insecticide DDT, which had been dubbed “one of the greatest discoveries of World War II” by Time magazine for its ability to kill insects that spread malaria and typhus and was routinely sprayed in homes and on crops.

Carson called for much greater caution against these “elixirs of death” and wrote, “If we are living so intimately with chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their power.”

Though the scientific community already knew of the dangers, Carson was the first to make the information accessible and palatable to a mass audience in her groundbreaking book. “She wrote for the general public, not the scientific community,” says Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. “Readers, including housewives who used a lot of these chemicals, were shocked with what they learned."

She argued “that people have a right to know what they're being exposed to and what risks are posed,” says William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson . This was particularly relevant given that the book was published at the height of the Cold War. To help readers understand the dangers, Carson drew a parallel between pesticide contamination and fallout from the regular testing of nuclear weapons. “In framing these issues as siblings,” says Souder, “Carson helped the public to understand that pesticides could be harmful, even though you weren't aware of their presence, something that people already knew about radiation.”

'Silent Spring' Has Immediate Impact

The public’s first glimpse at Silent Spring had actually come in June 1962 when The New Yorker ran three excerpts. By the time it was published that fall, it was in such high demand that it became an instant bestseller. In the first three months, it sold more than 100,000 hardcover copies, and in two years, more than one million.

The book was quickly celebrated. Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, said, “Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and E.B White of the New Yorker both compared the impact of the book to Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

As expected, the reaction from the chemical companies was swift and severe. One industry spokesperson dismissed Carson’s claims as “absurd.” Others accused her of being a hysterical woman, a communist and a radical. The president of the company that made DDT said Carson wrote “not as a scientist, but as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.”

The New York Times covered the industry’s reaction in a front-page article: “The $300,000,000 pesticides industry has been highly irritated by a quiet woman author whose previous works on science have been praised for the beauty and precision of the writing.”

Carson had resisted writing the book for years because of these anticipated attacks from the chemical companies as well as public officials who had accepted their false claims. “It was a David versus Goliath sort of saga,” says Lear. “ She was uncovering industrial misdeeds and, in the course of that, bringing down powerful men who had been entrusted by the public and shown to be unworthy of that trust.”

Fortunately, Carson decided the personal risks were worth it. But it came at great personal cost as she was fighting breast cancer throughout much of the four years in which she wrote Silent Spring . “In the end, she gave in to a sense of obligation,” says Souder. “She felt that she had no other choice but to tackle the subject herself.”

JFK Spotlights Carson's Book

Shortly after her book was published, President Kennedy was asked at a press conference if the government would look into the long-term effects of synthetic pesticides. He responded, “Yes, and I know they already are. I think, particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.”

The following April, 15 million viewers tuned in to watch a CBS TV special, called “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.” Carson’s thoughtful responses and calm demeanor despite her failing health bolstered her arguments. She said, “It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”

In May 1963, President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee issued its long-awaited pesticide report, which validated Carson’s work. The committee’s scientists called for more research into potential health hazards related to pesticides and urged more restraint in their widespread use in homes and fields.

The CBS program combined with the findings of the presidential committee had solidified pesticides as a major public issue. Silent Spring had awakened a new environmental consciousness and set the stage for the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, which regulated use of pesticides, and the banning of DDT in 1972.

Carson died from breast cancer on April 14, 1964, less than two years after her seminal book was published but not before she changed the way Americans viewed their world. Says Souder, “Carson changed the conversation about the environment, recasting humankind as part of nature, not above it.”

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Home of the Unlikely Environmentalist

Silent Spring – Book Review

Simple, beautiful, and evocative illustrations by Lois and Louis Darling begin each chapter.

Book Review

In a way, Silent Spring is a classic tale of warfare—us against them. The war described in the book is between man and other members of nature, specifically unwanted insects (pests) and to a lesser extent unwanted plants (weeds). As with all wars, there is collateral damage and unintended consequences. The weapons of this war were pesticides, herbicides, and other toxic chemicals, many of which were byproducts of another war, World War II.

Readers learn about the impact of these “elixirs of death” on not only their intended targets of insect pests and weeds but also on the water, soil, plants, animals, and humans. Carson recounts the effects of widespread insecticide spraying operations that took place over millions and millions of acres of land, often repeatedly. In the end, the insects just came back in greater numbers as they adapted quickly to the poisons, but damage to plants, animals, and humans was long lasting and sometimes fatal.

The book tells of how chemical companies convinced farmers, ranchers, foresters, and governmental agencies that insecticides and herbicides were necessary and safe. They, in turn, informed the public there was nothing to worry about. The areas sprayed included forests, agricultural land, orchards, roadsides, and even residential neighborhoods. Many times insecticides and herbicides were applied without the consent of the public and often without any pre-notification.

Carson was not against killing insects that carry infection and disease, just the practice of killing off everything else at the same time. In the final chapter, she describes some alternatives. Silent Spring contains a lot of scientific information, research, facts, and examples. The 50 or so pages at the end of the text contain Carson’s sources.

One section in the book that struck me described an effort to expand cattle grazing land by using herbicides to kill off sagebrush. Justice William O. Douglas tells of attending a meeting where citizen protests were discussed. A woman had opposed the plan as it would kill all the wildflowers. Justice Douglas said,

“Yet, was not her right to search out a banded cup or tiger lily as inalienable as the right of stockmen to search out grass or of a lumberman to claim a tree?”

The Bottom Line

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and enjoyed writing about nature. She spent most of her professional life with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and was already an accomplished nature writer by the time Silent Spring was published in 1962.

The publication of Silent Spring brought the widespread use and effects of pesticides and herbicides into the public view and provided inspiration for environmentalists across the country.

Silent Spring unleashed an avalanche of attacks on Carson and many people tried to discredit her. In the end, her voice was not silenced and although Silent Spring was written over 50 years ago, Rachel Carson and her message live on.

The next time you grab a can of insecticide to kill an ant trail in your kitchen or a can of herbicide to spray to kill the crabgrass on your lawn, put the can away, and go read Silent Spring .

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Author: Linda Poppenheimer

Linda researches and writes about environmental topics to share information and to spark conversation. Her mission is to live more lightly on Earth and to persuade everyone else to do the same. View all posts by Linda Poppenheimer

One thought on “Silent Spring – Book Review”

I remember reading “Silent Spring” when it was first published. I was either too young, too naive, or did not want to believe way back in the 60’s. My appreciation for nature was limited as a child but fortunately as an adult I have been exposed to wilderness areas, forests, wild flowers, natural wonders, the beauty of our planet. My moment of truth began when I saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. This was a powerful message. Lucky for us that someone with worldwide recognition got serious about how very fragile our planet is. “Nova” on PBS recently had an outstanding program, “Earth from Space”, describing the inter relatedness of our planet (wind, rain, snow, oceans, plants, fish, animals, habitats, sun, etc.) Many of the amazing photos were taken by our myriad of satellites that are now circling our planet. There really is no excuse for not believing that we must all get serious and make a difference in any way we can. “Later” is a frightening word we can no longer use in any discourse about the future of our planet.

Bob on Books

Thoughts on books, reading, and life

Review: Silent Spring

Summary: This classic of environmental writing made the case that pesticides were rendering harm to just about everything in the American landscape, including human beings, except for the pests targeted by these chemical poisons.

I grew up in the era when pesticide use was far more common than at present. I probably carry DDT and a host of other chemicals in my fatty tissue, though far less than would otherwise have been the case because of Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 work. Carson was a trained marine biologist who became a science writer winning a National Book award for her 1951 best seller The Sea Around Us. In high school, we celebrated the first Earth Day and read an excerpt of her work. But I never read the work in its entirety until now.

The book is a case against pesticide use and ultimately resulted in the banning of DDT and limitations on the use of other pesticides. Carson tells a tale of how pesticides sprayed from planes or by other means end up in rivers and ground water, often killing fish, wildlife and domestic animals, and sometimes human beings. Her meticulous research covers things like the effects of these pesticides on soil, which is a living thing, not just dirt, until pesticides wipe out much of the life in the soil. The title comes from the effects of pesticides on birds. She describes spraying operations that wipe out whole bird populations and others that essentially sterilize the birds, meaning no young hatch from the few eggs they are able to lay. And she tells the human toll, in terms of various health effects including rising incidence of cancer.

Rachel Carson

But she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to show that insects, the primary target of these pesticides quickly develop natural resistance, primarily because they breed much faster than humans or other animals. Therefore, these poisons are quickly rendered ineffective. She argues that biological controls and natural enemies are a far better way of dealing with these pests. Her account is a salutary tale of the use of chemical and technological solutions that are far worse than the problem they are intended to solve.

The book combines a beauty of style with meticulous research and numerous citations of scientific papers to support every example cited. She expected a firestorm of opposition from the chemical companies, which she indeed encountered but her clear and beautiful prose won the day in the court of public opinion, a victory she was not around to witness, losing her life to breast cancer in 1964. The Fiftieth Anniversary edition includes an Afterword by biologist E. O. Wilson paying tribute to Carson’s work.

Finishing her book left me wondering whether someone could write a similar book today about our coming water problems, or the climate changes that will drastically alter life, if not for us, then for our children. Then, as now, powerful interests stand against any decisive action to address these issues. Yet one woman, already dying, wrote with style and care making a case that awoke the American people and gave birth to the environmental movement. Because of her, bald eagles have rebounded, chemicals are at least less-pervasive than they once were and organic growing is bringing us safer foods. Will such a book be written to address the ills facing our children and grand-children? Let us hope so.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – Review

Silent Spring [1] is one of those books that many people may have heard of, even if they have not read it. Until about one month ago, this was true of me. It is an immensely powerful book, one that forms part of your personal experience in a way only a few books do.

At home, she suffered challenges which led her to take full-time employment (analysing marine data with the Fisheries Bureau) so that she could support her widowed mother and her sister’s two orphaned daughters. She also wrote free-lance wildlife articles. In 1948 she gave up nearly all of her government work to concentrate on writing and independent research, proceeding to begin a three part ‘biography of the sea’ the first part of which was published by Oxford University Press [2] . Around the mid 1950s her main focus moved from the sea to conservation issues, especially the increasing use of manufactured pesticides. At home her responsibilities increased: in 1957 when her niece died prematurely, she adopted her five-year-old son, supporting him alongside her 88-year-old mother.

Rachel Carson was a rigorous scientist, and Silent Spring , though readable for the layperson, is packed full with verifiable research and data. In one chapter alone, she credits 42 sources for her information. This is significant, because she was well aware that her main conclusions were about as welcome to the chemical industry as a climate change campaigner at a Hummer show. Before publication she took the precaution of consulting other experienced scientists and medical researchers, fearing potential legal challenge unless she had her facts completely straight. This scientific rigour as well as widespread favourable public opinion [3] meant that attempts by representatives of the American chemical industry to gag and discredit her soon fizzled out.

Indeed, the book was almost immediately hugely influential. Despite having to cope with treatment for breast cancer and failing health, Carson did get to testify to President Kennedy’s Scientific Advisory Committee in 1963, and see some of her advice implemented through bans and restrictions on pesticide use (especially DDT).

What then, does Silent Spring tell us? Carson chose to introduce her book with an imagined scenario: the American countryside in a spring devoid of birds and other wildlife-hence silent. In the remaining sixteen chapters she explains how this possibility, in her view, was a distinct probability, unless action was taken to reduce the use of recent manufactured chemical pesticides and herbicides. To begin with, she explains the invention of the two main groups of industrial chemicals, chlorinated hydrocarbons (eg DDT) and those based on organic phosphorus (eg parathion). She argues that these products, largely invented for military purposes, got deployed after the end of the Second World War in a different war: against insect pests.

Carson provides us with details of this chemical war waged in the environment around her. Pests such as the fire ant and the spruce budworm were targeted (seemingly even when their threat was minor) and she catalogues the unintended consequences-polluted ground water; contaminated soil; death and disease in migrating salmon, water fowl, and songbirds (robins, in particular); and hedgerows decimated by herbicides.

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. The sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the colour and beauty and interest they lend to our world have come about swiftly, insidiously and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected. (95)

She includes too, an analysis of the toll taken on human health. She details cases of accidental exposure of workers to DDT as well as the known and/or suspected harm (including cancer) as a result of handling or eating plants or animals affected by chemical use. Primarily she questions the wisdom of introducing factory-made chemicals so fast and in such large quantities to the natural environment without testing their long-term effects. Specifically, she describes how the concentration of harmful chemical residues intensifies with each stage in the food chain. She also explains what biological resistance means and how an intended target pest could become resistant ( in the previous example of fire ants, a pesticide called haptachlor ended up virtually eradicating its predator, the corn borer):

…farmers have repeatedly traded one insect enemy for a worse one as spraying upsets the population dynamics of the insect world (234)

Along the way Carson gives us insight into her philosophy of living things, and especially the idea of balance in nature:

…a complex, precise and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a man perched on the edge of a cliff (226).

But above all she sets out to win both our minds and our hearts. I believe that she respected and felt committed, deep down, to the balance of nature, a commitment that developed out of her love of nature and her experience as a biologist. Continually she reminds us that to ignore nature and act as if humanity’s special role is to conquer it, can lead to very nasty surprises. So her ecological commitment was both moral and pragmatic; we should accept and honour the fact that we are part of the web of life, whilst to disregard that truth is irrational, as it may cause us serious harm.

Carson argues then that science and ethics go together. Those of us involved in sustainable farming or who adopt an ethical approach to the food, beauty care and other products they buy, or who work in animal welfare, human health, biodiversity and much more, all owe her a debt. No wonder Silent Spring had such a huge impact.

We can celebrate that Carson’s work led to the near-universal banning of DDT [4] and restraint in the use of other industrial chemicals. She reminded those of us that are farmers that there are benefits from abandoning the unnatural ‘monoculture’ model of agriculture for an approach that encompasses biodiversity. But two other questions she raised still hang uncomfortably over our ways of doing things.

First is the question of independent scientific research. In her own time Carson lamented the disparity between the huge budgets lavished on chemical -cide research and the modest sums allocated to biologists. She reminds us that most scientific research is dictated by commercial interests. And, in large part, bodies fund research that they consider will lead to financial gain; other potential research areas that could have led to huge benefit to human life, or the environment, go overlooked. Now, just as then, it is crucial to ask: is there a commercial objective that could be compromising research we read or hear about? Could there be a deliberate attempt to drown out any conflicting results?

Second is the question of public health. Her account of investigations to establish how human beings are affected by “chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man” (171) gives the layperson an idea of what a complex area cause and effect is, in relation to health. And I’m not convinced that even our experts understand the full impact, at a genetic and cell level, of chemical pollution in our water, our air and maybe our food, through industrial and agri-business practices, food additives, medication…

But I’d like to end on a positive note. Carson’s efforts led to bans on chemical products known to injure human health and she put the issue of environmental pollution on the political agenda in democratic societies. [5] Her arguments in favour of biological control as a viable alternative to chemical spraying have led to widespread, safe and effective use of biological predators. (I really wish she was still around to tell us what she thought of GM.) Her guiding principles – a belief in ecology and ethical independent science- are her abiding legacy, and remain our best guides still in ongoing debates about the environment.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – Amazon

Photo Credits

Crop Duster photo by Ken Hammond

Rachel Carson portrait from her official US Fish and Wildlife Service employee photo taken in 1940.

[1] I used the fiftieth anniversary edition: Silent Spring Penguin Classics London 2012. This includes a foreword by Caroline Lucas.

[2] The Sea Around Us Oxford University Press 1951

[3] The book was serialised before being published in September 1962, principally in the popular New Yorker paper; it was chosen as book of the month just after publication, CBS Radio dramatised it, and reviewers praised it.

[4] DDT was banned in agricultural use in the US in 1972. Other countries followed suit (not until 1984 in the UK however!) It is still used against malaria, and there are vociferous supporters of its use for this purpose. However, research shows that mosquitoes build up resistance to DDT very quickly, and that community led approaches involving more than just DDT are most effective. In 2014 a UK study found higher levels of DDT residues in those suffering with Alzheimers.

[5] It is interesting also to note how many key issues she identified back when she wrote the book over fifty years ago. She raised the question of health and safety for consumers of garden chemicals (sold alongside foods in the supermarket), and the related question of misleading marketing (she felt that what were essentially poisons had a cosy, domesticated image in adverts and packaging). She set a benchmark for good research. She showed how politicians may invent crusades -at the end of the second world war the war on insects gave a plausible reason for putting decommissioned military planes back into service. She also touched on the issue of grass roots democracy when she described an environmental campaign by inhabitants of Maine.

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How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement

By Eliza Griswold

Sept. 21, 2012

On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.

“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.

“Silent Spring” was published 50 years ago this month. Though she did not set out to do so, Carson influenced the environmental movement as no one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond. “Silent Spring” presents a view of nature compromised by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT. Once these pesticides entered the biosphere, Carson argued, they not only killed bugs but also made their way up the food chain to threaten bird and fish populations and could eventually sicken children. Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions. In doing so, Carson, the citizen-scientist, spawned a revolution.

“Silent Spring,” which has sold more than two million copies, made a powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature would in turn poison humankind. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves,” she told the subcommittee. We still see the effects of unfettered human intervention through Carson’s eyes: she popularized modern ecology.

If anything, environmental issues have grown larger — and more urgent — since Carson’s day. Yet no single work has had the impact of “Silent Spring.” It is not that we lack eloquent and impassioned environmental advocates with the capacity to reach a broad audience on issues like climate change. Bill McKibben was the first to make a compelling case, in 1989, for the crisis of global warming in “The End of Nature.” Elizabeth Kolbert followed with “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.” Al Gore sounded the alarm with “An Inconvenient Truth,” and was awarded the Nobel Prize. They are widely considered responsible for shaping our view of global warming, but none was able to galvanize a nation into demanding concrete change in quite the way that Carson did.

What was it that allowed Carson to capture the public imagination and to forge America’s environmental consciousness?

Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature,” as she is called, is frequently invoked in the name of one environmental cause or another, but few know much about her life and work. “People think she came out of nowhere to deliver this Jeremiad of ‘Silent Spring,’ but she had three massive best sellers about the sea before that,” McKibben says. “She was Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.”

The sea held an immense appeal to a woman who grew up landlocked and poor as Carson did. She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away, down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons’ four-room log cabin. Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to their death. The smell of tankage, fertilizer made from horse parts, was so rank that, along with the mosquitoes that bred in the swampland near the riverbank called the Bottoms, it prevented Springdale’s 1,200 residents from sitting on their porches in the evening.

Her father, Robert Carson, was a ne’er-do-well whose ventures inevitably failed; Carson’s elder sister, Marian, did shift work in the town’s coal-fired power plant. Carson’s mother, Maria, the ambitious and embittered daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had great hopes that her youngest daughter, Rachel, could be educated and would escape Springdale. Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women, now known as Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore, where she attended graduate school for zoology at Johns Hopkins University and completed a master’s degree before dropping out to help support her family. The Carsons fared even worse during the Depression, and they fled Springdale, leaving heavy debts behind.

Carson became a science editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency founded under the New Deal. Eager to be a writer, she freelanced for The Atlantic and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. Driven by her love of the sea, she wrote on everything from where to go for summer vacation to what to do with the catch of the day to the life cycles of sea creatures. Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense of wonder” about nature. In her best-selling sea books — “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea-Wind” — she used simple and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.

Carson was initially ambivalent about taking on what she referred to as “the poison book.” She didn’t see herself as an investigative reporter. By this time, she’d received the National Book Award for “The Sea Around Us” and established herself as the naturalist of her day. This was a much folksier and less controversial role than the one “the poison book” would put her in. Taking on some of the largest and most powerful industrial forces in the world would have been a daunting proposition for anyone, let alone a single woman of her generation. She tried to enlist other writers to tackle the dangers of pesticides. E.B. White, who was at The New Yorker, which serialized Carson’s major books, gently suggested that she investigate pesticides for The New Yorker herself. So she did.

“Silent Spring” begins with a myth, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which Carson describes “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Cognizant of connecting her ideal world to one that readers knew, Carson presents not a pristine wilderness but a town where people, roads and gutters coexist with nature — until a mysterious blight befalls this perfect place. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Carson knew that her target audience of popular readers included scores of housewives. She relied upon this ready army of concerned citizens both as sources who discovered robins and squirrels poisoned by pesticides outside their back doors and as readers to whom she had to appeal. Consider this indelible image of a squirrel: “The head and neck were outstretched, and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting at the ground.” Carson then asks her readers, “By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”

Her willingness to pose the moral question led “Silent Spring” to be compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written nearly a century earlier. Both books reflected the mainstream Protestant thinking of their time, which demanded personal action to right the wrongs of society. Yet Carson, who was baptized in the Presbyterian Church, was not religious. One tenet of Christianity in particular struck her as false: the idea that nature existed to serve man. “She wanted us to understand that we were just a blip,” says Linda Lear, author of Carson’s definitive biography, “Witness for Nature.” “The control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human arrogance.”

“Silent Spring” was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress. In Carson’s view, technological innovation could easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity,” McKibben says. “She was the first to tap into an idea that other people were starting to feel.”

Carson’s was one of several moral calls to arms published at the start of the ’60s. Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of American Cities,” Michael Harrington’s “Other America,” Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” and Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” all captured a growing disillusionment with the status quo and exposed a system they believed disenfranchised people. But “Silent Spring,” more than the others, is stitched through with personal rage. In 1960, according to Carson’s assistant, after she found out that her breast cancer had metastasized, her tone sharpened toward the apocalyptic. “She was more hostile about what arrogant technology and blind science could do,” notes Lear, her biographer.

“No one,” says Carl Safina, an oceanographer and MacArthur fellow who has published several books on marine life, “had ever thought that humans could create something that could create harm all over the globe and come back and get in our bodies.” Safina took me out in his sea kayak around Lazy Point, an eastern spoke of Long Island, to see three kinds of terns, which zipped around us over the bay. We then crossed the point in his red Prius to visit thriving osprey, one species of bird that was beginning to die out when “Silent Spring” made public that DDT weakened their eggshells. As we peered through binoculars at a 40-foot-high nest woven from sticks, old mops and fishnets, a glossy black osprey returned to his mate and her chicks with a thrashing fish in his talons. Safina told me that he began to read “Silent Spring” when he was 14 years old, in the back seat of his parents’ sedan.

“I almost threw up,” he said. “I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren’t raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals.” That a corporation would create a product that didn’t operate as advertised —“this was shocking in a way we weren’t inured to,” Safina said.

Though Carson talked about other pesticides, it was DDT — sprayed aerially over large areas of the United States to control mosquitoes and fire ants — that stood in for this excess. DDT was first synthesized in 1874 and discovered to kill insects in 1939 by Paul Hermann Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this work. During World War II, DDT applied to the skin in powder form proved an effective means to control lice in soldiers. But it wasn’t just DDT’s effectiveness that led to its promotion, Carson maintained; it was a surfeit of product and labor. In her speeches, Carson claimed that after the war, out-of-work pilots and a glut of the product led the United States government and industry to seek new markets for DDT among American consumers.

By the time Carson began to be interested in pesticides, in the mid-1940s, concerns related to DDT were mounting among wildlife biologists at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md., which was administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and elsewhere. Controversy over pesticides’ harmful effects on birds and plants led to high-profile lawsuits on the part of affected residents who wanted to stop the aerial spraying.

Carson used the era’s hysteria about radiation to snap her readers to attention, drawing a parallel between nuclear fallout and a new, invisible chemical threat of pesticides throughout “Silent Spring.” “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she wrote. “How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”

Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, knew that such comparisons would be explosive. They tried to control the response to the book by seeking support before publication. They sent galleys to the National Audubon Society for public endorsement.

The galleys landed on the desk of Audubon’s biologist, Roland Clement, for review. Clement, who will turn 100 in November, currently lives in a studio on the 17th floor of a retirement community in New Haven, about a mile from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Carson’s papers are kept. “I knew of everything she wrote about,” he told me over lunch at his home this summer. “She had it right.”

The book, which was published on Sept. 27, 1962, flew off the shelves, owing largely to its three-part serialization in The New Yorker that summer. “Silent Spring” was also selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which delighted Carson. But nothing established Carson more effectively than her appearance on “CBS Reports,” an hourlong television news program hosted by a former war correspondent, Eric Sevareid. On camera, Carson’s careful way of speaking dispelled any notions that she was a shrew or some kind of zealot. Carson was so sick during filming at home in suburban Maryland that in the course of the interview, she propped her head on her hands. According to Lear as well as William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, “On a Farther Shore,” Sevareid later said that he was afraid Carson wouldn’t survive to see the show broadcast.

The industry’s response to “Silent Spring” proved more aggressive than anyone anticipated. As Lear notes, Velsicol, a manufacturer of DDT, threatened to sue both Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker. And it also tried to stop Audubon from excerpting the book in its magazine. Audubon went ahead and even included an editorial about the chemical industry’s reaction to the book. But after “Silent Spring” came out, the society declined to give it an official endorsement.

The personal attacks against Carson were stunning. She was accused of being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an affinity for cats. In one threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin, Velsicol’s general counsel insinuated that there were “sinister influences” in Carson’s work: she was some kind of agricultural propagandist in the employ of the Soviet Union, he implied, and her intention was to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to achieve “east-curtain parity.”

But Carson also had powerful advocates, among them President John F. Kennedy, who established a presidential committee to investigate pesticides. Then, in June 1963, Carson made her appearance before the Senate subcommittee. In her testimony, Carson didn’t just highlight the problems that she identified in “Silent Spring”; she presented the policy recommendations she’d been working on for the past five years. When faced with a chance to do so, Carson didn’t call for a ban on pesticides. “I think chemicals do have a place,” she testified.

She argued vehemently against aerial spraying, which allowed the government to dump pesticides on people’s property without their permission. She cited dairy farmers in upstate New York, whose milk was banned from the market after their land was sprayed to eradicate gypsy moths. As Carson saw it, the federal government, when in industry’s thrall, was part of the problem. That’s one reason that she didn’t call for sweeping federal regulation. Instead, she argued that citizens had the right to know how pesticides were being used on their private property. She was reiterating a central tenet of “Silent Spring”: “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” She advocated for the birth of a grass-roots movement led by concerned citizens who would form nongovernmental groups that she called “citizen’s brigades.”

The results of her efforts were mixed, and even her allies have different opinions of what Carson’s legacy actually means. Carson is widely credited with banning DDT, by both her supporters and her detractors. The truth is a little more complicated. When “Silent Spring” was published, DDT production was nearing its peak; in 1963, U.S. companies manufactured about 90,000 tons. But by the following year, DDT production in America was already on the wane. Despite the pesticide manufacturers’ aggression toward Carson and her book, there was mounting evidence that some insects were increasingly resistant to DDT, as Carson claimed. After Roland Clement testified before the Senate subcommittee, he says, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the Democrat from Connecticut who was chairman of the committee, pulled him aside. “He told me that the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of DDT,” Clement says, but only if they could strike a bargain: as long as Carson and Clement would accept the companies’ continued export of DDT to foreign countries, the companies would consider the end of domestic use. Their message was clear, Clement says: “Don’t mess with the boys and their business.”

Though Clement was a supporter of Carson’s, he believes that she got both too much credit and too much blame after “Silent Spring” came out. “It’s a fabrication to say that she’s the founder of the environmental movement,” Clement says. “She stirred the pot. That’s all.” It wasn’t until 1972, eight years after Carson’s death, that the United States banned the domestic sale of DDT, except where public health concerns warranted its use. American companies continued to export the pesticide until the mid-1980s. (China stopped manufacturing DDT in 2007. In 2009, India, the only country to produce the pesticide at the time, made 3,653 tons.)

The early activists of the new environmental movement had several successes attributed to Carson — from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the establishment of Earth Day to President Nixon’s founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970. But if “Silent Spring” can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

The well-financed counterreaction to Carson’s book was a prototype for the brand of attack now regularly made by super-PACs in everything from debates about carbon emissions to new energy sources. “As soon as ‘Silent Spring’ is serialized, the chemical companies circle the wagons and build up a war chest,” Souder says. “This is how the environment became such a bitter partisan battle.”

In a move worthy of Citizens United, the chemical industry undertook an expensive negative P.R. campaign, which included circulating “The Desolate Year,” a parody of “A Fable for Tomorrow” that mocked its woeful tone. The parody, which was sent out to newspapers around the country along with a five-page fact sheet, argued that without pesticides, America would be overrun by insects and Americans would not be able to grow enough food to survive.

One reason that today no single book on, say, climate change could have the influence that “Silent Spring” did, Souder argues, is the five decades of political fracturing that followed its publication. “The politicized and partisan reaction created by ‘Silent Spring’ has hardened over the past 50 years,” Souder says. Carson may have regarded “Silent Spring” and stewardship of the environment as a unifying issue for humankind, but a result has been an increasingly factionalized arena.

Carson was among the first environmentalists of the modern era to be charged with using “soft science” and with cherry-picking studies to suit her ideology. Fifty years later, the attacks on Carson continue. Her opponents hold her responsible for the death of millions of African children from malaria; in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear,” one character says that “banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,” a sentiment Crichton publicly agreed with. The Web site rachelwaswrong.org, which is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group based in Washington, makes a similar charge: “Today, millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.”

But much of Carson’s science was accurate and forward-looking. Dr. Theo Colborn, an environmental health analyst and co-author of a 1996 book, “Our Stolen Future,” about endocrine disrupters — the chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormone system — points out that Carson was on the cutting edge of the science of her day. “If Rachel had lived,” she said, “we might have actually found out about endocrine disruption two generations ago.”

Today, from Rachel Carson’s old bedroom window in Springdale, you can see the smokestacks of the Cheswick coal-fired power plant less than a mile away: an older red-and-white, candy-striped stack and a newer one, called a scrubber, installed in 2010 to remove sulfur dioxide. It later needed repairs, but with the approval of the Allegheny County Health Department, it stayed open, and the plant operated for three months without full emission controls. The plants says it is in compliance with current E.P.A. emissions standards for coal-fired plants, though new ones will take full effect in 2016.

Springdale’s board of supervisors supports the plant’s business. As David Finley, president of Springdale Borough put it, the noise from the plant used to bother a handful of residents, but it “sounds like money” to many others. The plant buys fresh water from an underground river that runs through the borough and has paid for things like Little League uniforms and repairs to the municipal swimming pool. Springdale has been nicknamed “Power City” since the days Carson lived there. The high-school sports teams are called the Dynamos; their mascot is Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon character of the electricity lobby.

A few months ago, two citizens in Springdale volunteered to be representatives in a class-action suit, which charges that the coal-fired plant “installed limited technology” to control emissions that they claim are damaging 1,500 households. One of the plaintiffs, Kristie Bell, is a 33-year-old health care employee who lives in a two-story yellow-brick house with a broad front porch, a few blocks from Carson’s childhood home. Bell said it was “Silent Spring” that encouraged her to step forward. “Rachel Carson is a huge influence,” Bell said, sitting at her kitchen table after work on a sultry evening last summer. “She’s a motivator.” For Bell, Carson’s message is a call to mothers to stand up against industry to protect the health of their families.

Detractors have argued that the lawsuit is the creation of personal-injury attorneys. (Because of the difficulty of making a clear health case, the plaintiffs are claiming property damage caused by corrosive ash.) But Bell said that it’s not about money. “I never sit outside on my front porch because I don’t know what’s coming out of that smokestack,” she said. One hundred years ago, when Carson was a child, residents of Springdale had the same concern — one that informed Carson’s worldview. “When we start messing around with Mother Nature,” Bell said, “bad things happen.”

Eliza Griswold is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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The Story of Silent Spring

How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind's impact on nature.

Rachel Carson sits near tide pools and holds a glass jar with a sample of water in it

Rachel Carson on a beach in Maryland

Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

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Although they will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots, or stormy political campaigns, books have at times been the most powerful influencer of social change in American life. Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the Revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the North's antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring , which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity's faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement.

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for FWS, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.

"Things go out of kilter"

Carson was happiest writing about the strength and resilience of natural systems. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of the Sea were hymns to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things. Although she rarely used the term, Carson held an ecological view of nature, describing in precise yet poetic language the complex web of life that linked mollusks to seabirds to the fish swimming in the ocean's deepest and most inaccessible reaches.

DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed nature's vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Developed in 1939, it first distinguished itself during World War II, clearing South Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects for U.S. troops while being used as an effective delousing powder in Europe. Its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize.

When DDT became available for civilian use in 1945, there were only a few people who expressed second thoughts about this new miracle compound. One was nature writer Edwin Way Teale, who warned, "A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away." Another was Carson, who wrote to Reader's Digest to propose an article about a series of tests on DDT being conducted not far from where she lived in Maryland. The magazine rejected the idea.

Silent Spring

Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months—not only the targeted insects but countless more—and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life—from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children—had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.

Vindication

Her careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which ones were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the manufacturers.

The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined—the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species—were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born.

Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

One of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Spring' s message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publication. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can’t resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can’t republish our material wholesale or automatically—you need to select stories individually; you can’t republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should drop us a note to let us know when you’ve used one of our stories.

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Silent Spring Paperback – Unabridged, February 1, 2022

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First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. “Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters” (Peter Matthiessen, for Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson’s watershed book with a new introduction by the author and activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new afterword by the acclaimed Rachel Carson biographer Linda Lear, who tells the story of Carson’s courageous defense of her truths in the face of ruthless assault from the chemical industry in the year following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death in 1964.

Print length 400 pages
Language English
Publisher Mariner Books Classics
Publication date February 1, 2022
Reading age 14 years and up
Dimensions 5.5 x 0.88 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10 0618249060
ISBN-13 978-0618249060
Lexile measure 1340L
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; Anniversary edition (February 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0618249060
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0618249060
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1340L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.88 x 8.25 inches
#1 in Environmentalism
#2 in Natural History (Books)
#2 in Environmental Science (Books)

About the authors

Linda j. lear.

Linda Lear is an environmental historian and the author of two prize-winning biographies: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (2009) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007). She has written the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (2012) and edited an anthology of Carson's unpublished writing, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998). She maintains www.rachelcarson.org. Linda lives in Bethesda, Maryland and Charleston, South Carolina.

Rachel L. Carson

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By the late 1950s, she had written three lyrical, popular books about the sea, including the bestselling The Sea Around Us, and had become the most respected science writer in America. She completed Silent Spring against formidable personal odds, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history.

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Silent Spring

Rachel carson, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Silent Spring: Introduction

Silent spring: plot summary, silent spring: detailed summary & analysis, silent spring: themes, silent spring: quotes, silent spring: characters, silent spring: symbols, silent spring: theme wheel, brief biography of rachel carson.

Historical Context of Silent Spring

Other books related to silent spring.

Full Title: Silent Spring
When Written: 1958-1962
Where Written: Silver Spring, Maryland
When Published: 1962
Genre: Environmental Science, Nonfiction
Setting: United States
Antagonist: Uncontrolled pesticide spraying
Point of View: Carson narrates in the first person

Extra Credit for Silent Spring

Influencing Al Gore. Al Gore, former vice president and major spokesperson for public awareness of climate change, cites Rachel Carson’s book as one of the most important reasons that he became involved with environmental interests.

Undersea Love. Carson’s first job as a copywriter with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries was writing for a short weekly radio broadcast entitled “Romance Under the Waters.”

Silent Spring

By rachel carson, silent spring analysis.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Anastasia Melnyk

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is a warning of a terrible tragedy that might happen in the future because of our neglectfulness, carelessness, indifference, and – let’s be honest – greediness. Archeologists have proven that people have always had issues with an eco-friendly style of life. Even when we didn’t have pesticides and the chemical industry at all, our ancestors already had problems with the environment. Unfortunately for us, we, contemporary people, still don’t know how to lessen our impact on nature, thus the world is in danger. Carson shows that it is our responsibility to maintain balance of nature whose fragile harmony can be disturbed so easily and irrevocably.

The planet we so baldly and presumptuously call ours is also a home for animals, fish, birds, insects, plants, and mushrooms. If you go outside and have a look at your surroundings, you will see trees, birds, pets, and other living beings. These are usual things that we don’t even notice, taking them for granted. However, there might be a day when parks, forests, and meadows disappear because we can really estimate the full impact of our decisions. Rachel Carson ’s story is mostly about chemical industry and pesticides that used to be and still actively used in the agricultural sector. The amount of chemicals that get into our water is increasing with an alarming rate, the temperature records are being set every season, the whole world is changing. According to some scientists and activists, this world is slowly dying.

Silent Spring illustrates one of the possible scenarios of our future. Do we even notice insects? Some people say that we have our own problems, so there is no point in thinking about them. Here is the most terrible mistake. People have to understand that we do depend on nature. Let’s imagine all insects will disappear now, what will happen? As we all know, the food chain will be destroyed. Birds will probably perish first, then animals, and only then we. For now, the technologies are not that advanced to be able to replace insects and perform their part in pollination of plants. If pesticides kill insects, there is a high risk of hunger being on the rise in the world. We can’t even fully foresee what we and other living beings will have to endure. However, it is possible to assume that people are not going to like the new world where springs and summers will be deadly silent.

Rachel Carson's warning has to be spread around the world, so that everyone, every child, every teenager, and every adult knows that it is up to us if our future is going to be happy or not. We have to take responsibility for our actions now in order not to see our grandchildren cry tomorrow. This planet is not our property; we share it with our living being and that is the way it should be.

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Silent Spring Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Silent Spring is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Elaborate, “The best and cheapest controls for vegetation are not chemicals but other plants.”.

Man made chemicals introduce harmful agents into the delicate ecosystem. Plants and nature have the ability to provide checks and balances without harming the eco-system.

What are the key environmental degradation areas of concern to the author of Silent Springs?

A major theme in the novel is the idea that humans and society is general is not aware if the risks that come with using dangerous chemicals in the lands from where food comes from. The government and the pesticide manufacturers pushed on numerous...

Which of these sentences uses the subjunctive mood ?

D. I wish that the bird healthy again

Study Guide for Silent Spring

Silent Spring study guide contains a biography of Rachel Carson, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Silent Spring
Silent Spring Summary
Character List

Essays for Silent Spring

Silent Spring essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

Researching Silent Spring: Context and Reception
Rhetorical Analysis of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”
On Motherhood and Mother Earth-hood: Ecological Constructs in 'A Mercy' and 'Silent Spring'
Standing Courageously in the Face of Adversity

Wikipedia Entries for Silent Spring

Introduction
Research and writing
Promotion and reception
Translations

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem has turned this 62-year-old book into a bestseller on Amazon

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

Netflix’s epic sci-fi drama 3 Body Problem has brought newfound fame to a 62-year-old book about environmental science — one that’s now an Amazon bestseller thanks to being featured prominently in the new series.

If you’ve started watching 3 Body Problem , Netflix’s hit series from the Game of Thrones showrunners that’s currently #1 in the US, you’ve probably already heard that quote at least once; in fact, the first time you hear it is in the show’s first episode. 3 Body Problem begins in China, quickly zeroing in on an astrophysicist named Ye Wenjie, who gets sent to work at a remote military base. Importantly, the soldiers at that base are trying to make contact with aliens, and her work basically sets the entire plot of the show in motion.

During the first episode, someone gives Ye a copy of Silent Spring — and because she can understand English, the text resonates deeply with her. “In nature,” she reads out loud at one point, “nothing exists alone.”

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But while the show is very much an alien invasion story, it’s not totally about that. The looming invasion is really just the opportunity to present the meat-and-potatoes of the story, which is how humans choose to pull together and respond. The end result is a sci-fi drama of immense scale and profundity, with dazzling visual effects to keep viewers entertained throughout. “I’ve just finished watching through eight episodes of 3 Body Problem ,” legendary video game designer Hideo Kojima tweeted over the weekend.

“The original novel by Liu Cixin is depicted on a grand scale and in a unique style. With a slow-paced introduction, the ensemble drama spins a timeless story with intersecting characters. Abstract and surrealistic images, like that of ‘a blink in space’ and ‘a countdown reflected on the retina,’ are very difficult to visualize … However, the way this has been incorporated into a drama series with a worldwide perspective is brilliant. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have done a marvelous job.”

This article talks about:

Andy Meek is a reporter based in Memphis who has covered media, entertainment, and culture for over 20 years. His work has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, Forbes, and The Financial Times, and he’s written for BGR since 2015. Andy's coverage includes technology and entertainment, and he has a particular interest in all things streaming.

Over the years, he’s interviewed legendary figures in entertainment and tech that range from Stan Lee to John McAfee, Peter Thiel, and Reed Hastings.

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Silent Spring Revisited

Conor mark jameson.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2012

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SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION

John f. kennedy, rachel carson, lyndon johnson, richard nixon, and the great environmental awakening.

by Douglas Brinkley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2022

A solid addition to the literature at the intersection of environmentalism and politics.

Brinkley continues his cycles of histories in which presidents engage with the environment.

The great presidential conservationist, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt, subject of Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior . Rightful Heritage chronicled “FDR’s enthusiasm for preserving treasured landscapes in every state.” Here, the author charts the transformation of conservation into environmentalism, a change of understanding and emphasis that, in his view, owes disproportionately to popular books by Rachel Carson. Silent Spring inspired a campaign to reduce the use of the toxic pesticides that were entering the food chain and killing birds by the millions, and Carson’s works were favorites in the Kennedy White House. As Brinkley relates, when Lyndon Johnson came into office, he took action a step further. While his disastrous policies in Vietnam dragged his Great Society program down, Johnson got some important things done, drawing on the talents of environmental researchers who “were elevated as indispensable first responders rushing to save nothing less than the future of the United States.” Considering the Great Society a “bookend” of FDR’s New Deal, Brinkley also documents the considerable resistance to these environmental reforms on the part of industry, so that, when Richard Nixon arrived in the White House, he had to balance two opposing impulses: to let business and its right-wing think tanks have their way or to push through environmental legislation. He allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to come into being while cautioning its director that environmentalists were “a bunch of commie pinko queers.” Despite his many failures, Nixon got things done, too. (Who knew that he had “a soft spot in his heart for whales”?) Still, as this readable but overlong history documents, it was Carson who merits most of the credit, along with her Kennedy/Johnson Cabinet member Stuart Udall, “the most successful interior secretary in American history.”

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022

ISBN: 9780063212916

Page Count: 896

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

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edited by Stephen Kennedy Smith & Douglas Brinkley

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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Brendan Fraser Joins Cast of ‘Flower Moon’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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‘3 Body Problem’: How the Netflix Drama Differs from the Original Book

Proma khosla.

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[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for Netflix ‘s “ 3 Body Problem ” and Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” the book on which it is based.]

Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” is based on a wildly popular book series by Cixin Liu — but how close does it come to the source material? Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have experience adapting dense novels with “Game of Thrones” — but they’ve also been in the position of having to branch away from the original text and disappointing audiences as a result. “3 Body Problem,” which they co-created and executive produce with Alexander Woo, could face the same issues.

In IndieWire’s review of the show, Ben Travers noted the challenge that these creators face, bringing “detailed explanations of interstellar travel and multi-dimensional theory” to the screen in a way that viewers have to find compelling. That effort, he wrote, is “at times disorienting in its use of inconsistent CGI to convey the story’s momentousness and aggravating in its approach to character development and existential quandaries.”

So how does “3 Body Problem” line up with Cixin Liu’s first novel in the series? Let’s break down the major changes.

The Newbies

“silent spring”.

“3 Body Problem” most closely follows its source material in telling Wenjie’s story at the Red Coast Base, but one key detail sets up her actions and didn’t make it into the series. In Episode 1, Wenjie receives “Silent Spring” and reads aloud, “In nature, nothing exists alone.” She ostensibly finds resonance in this sentence, which comes up multiple times throughout the series, but the sentiment could be used to both undermine and bolster her disdain for humanity; humans don’t exist alone, but as a communal species — but they also aren’t alone in the universe, and must behave accordingly.

In Liu’s novel, Wenjie reads and rereads the book, and fixates on this passage:

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”

Wenjie’s early exposure to this idea, as well as her experiences during the Cultural Revolution, significantly inform the decision she makes in establishing contact with extraterrestrial life.

The Murders

When the Red Coast Commissar finds out about Wenjie’s contact with aliens (though not details of her message to them), and she decides to kill him in order to kill the trail. When her husband and colleague (and the father of her child) follows the Commissar out on a ruse errand, she doesn’t hesitate to kill them both. This entire chilling subplot — which, like the chosen snippet of “Silent Spring,” says a lot about Wenjie’s character — did not make it into the show.

A young woman sitting at a viewfinder and twisting to look back over her shoulder suspiciously; still from '3 Body Problem'

Whoever Is Out There

And though the book also doesn’t describe the physical look of Trisolarans or their planet, there are additional details disclosed throughout the investigation into Wenjie’s organization. Trisolarans measure time in Trisolaran hours and not any other unit, because of the instability of units like days and years with their multiple suns.

In the English translation, Wenjie and her growing group of comrades are known as the Earth Trisolaris Organization, or ETO — but they’re far from united. Factions bubble up within the group despite Wenjie’s intentions; the Adventists, the Redemptionists, and the Survivalists. Adventists want the destruction of humanity and Trisolaran superiority; Redemptionists treat Trisolarans like gods and are the most like religious followers; and Survivalists are willing to throw others under the bus to save themselves and their descendants when the San-Ti arrive.

As dense as some of the scientific explanations in “3 Body Problem” are, the details about Trisolaran sophons take up an entire chapter. Without the minutiae, omniscient multidimensional protons do seem a little convenient, but they are part of Liu’s text. Sophons are the reason the universe flickered, the reason for the countdown and the eye in the sky, and the technological mystery behind how Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) can communicate with the San-Ti in real time. Everything is sophons!

Judgment Day

The ship-slicing sequence mostly follows the book (right down to the unfortunate first casualty: a hose), but it felt worth noting that there aren’t innocent people children on board in that version.

“3 Body Problem” is now streaming on Netflix.

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