About the Author

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was born on a family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania. She earned a master's in zoology at Johns Hopkins before taking a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. She published Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951, winner of the National Book Award), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Silent Spring (1962), her exposé of the disastrous ecological effects of pesticide use, was an international bestseller.

A research biologist and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber was inspired to activism by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, becoming one of America's leading environmental writers and antipollution advocates. Her books include Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (2001), and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (2011).

Reviews

"Carson's Sea Trilogy is as gratifying to read today as it ever was. . . .  Each book achieves that rare feat of popular science: crafting a narrative so deceptively simple as to entice readers in and, once there, enchant them enough to stay as much for the prose as for the delicious morsels of data. . . . One cannot help but think of Carson working late into the night, crafting her perfect sentences with the precision of a jeweler. She was a scientist, yes, but also a disciple of the sea. These books are devotional works." —Scientific American

"The mysteries [Carson] pondered are oceans-deep, which is why her sea books, all these years later, remain an inexhaustible treasure, too." —The Wall Street Journal