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The Gentle Subversive
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
Mark Hamilton Lytle
288 pages
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13 illus.
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171x120mm
978-0-19-517247-8
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Paperback
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20 September 2007
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This item will be ordered from OUP USA. Items ordered from OUP USA are despatched and charged as soon as we receive them, which is normally within 2 weeks
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- A brief, fascinating account of the life of Rachel Carson, and the birth of the modern environmental movement
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation—including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry—and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact biography of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book.
Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral
and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed her love of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (a New York Times bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her "poison book": Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, women, and
other concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losing battle with cancer.
Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.Readership: Undergraduates in Environmental History
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Mark Hamilton Lytle, Professor of History and Environmental Studies and Chair of the American Studies Program, Bard College
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"The author wonderfully weaves literary interpretation, intimate biographical detail, and sociopolitical observations into a new narrative on the life and influence of Rachel Carson." - Jim Bingen, Michigan State University
"The Gentle Subversive is an easy book to read, providing a logical and interesting account of the development of Rachel Carson as a writer and as the eventual spokeswoman/symbol for the environmental movement of the 1960s and beyond." - Kathryn Flynn, Auburn University
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Foreword
Prologue
1. Spring: Sense of Wonder: Under the Sea-Wind
2. Summer: Florescence: The Sea Around Us
3. Fall: The Fullness of Life: From The Edge of the Sea to DDT
4. Winter: The Poison Book and the Dark Season of Vindication
Epilogue: Rachel Carson: The Legacy
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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