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Rachel CarsonWitness for Nature 
by Linda Lear.
Allen Lane, 634 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 7139 9236 0
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... could be wiped out for ever, and aircraft began drenching vast swathes of countryside with poison. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring focused public interest on the appalling risks that the US Government had ignored and stopped the policy of blanket spraying in its tracks. Its publication marked the beginning of the activism and public involvement that would ...

A Strange Blight

Meehan Crist: Rachel Carson’s Forebodings, 6 June 2019

‘Silent Spring’ and Other Writings on the Environment 
by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber.
Library of America, 546 pp., £29.99, March 2018, 978 1 59853 560 0
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... as now the die-offs were caused by human activity. In Silent Spring, her ecological masterpiece, Rachel Carson wrote of fish and birds mysteriously dropping dead all across America (‘In the summer of 1960 the refuge staff picked up hundreds of dead and dying birds at Tule Lake and Lower Klamath … herons, pelicans, grebes, gulls’), describing the ...

The Most Eligible Bachelor on the Planet

Thomas Jones: ‘The President is Missing’, 5 July 2018

The President Is Missing 
by Bill Clinton and James Patterson.
Century, 513 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 1 78089 839 1
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... he was brought up by his single mother. He married his law school sweetheart (called, bizarrely, Rachel Carson), and they had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional ...

Noddy is on page 248

Jay Griffiths: On the streets, 10 June 1999

The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Protest 
edited by Brian MacArthur.
Penguin, 440 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 670 87052 8
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DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain 
edited by George McKay.
Verso, 310 pp., £11, July 1998, 1 85984 260 7
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... poverty and war, and the selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former ...

Middle-Aged and Dishevelled

Rebecca Solnit: Endangered Species?, 23 March 2006

In the Company of Crows and Ravens 
by John Marzluff and Tony Angell.
Yale, 384 pp., £18.95, October 2005, 0 300 10076 0
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... Silent Spring’ (the first being the destruction of birds by DDT and other pesticides, which Rachel Carson addressed in her 1962 book). When I came to San Francisco, ravens and crows were a rare sight in urban spaces; they had become rare altogether in the 1920s, but populations since the 1980s have exploded. In the San Francisco Christmas count of ...

Homeric Cheese v. Technophiliac Relish

David Cooper: GM food, 18 May 2000

... organic farming, are supposed to consign to history. (In 1962, the first lady of environmentalism, Rachel Carson, was enthusiastic, for just this reason, about the potential of the bio-insecticide B.t., now reviled for its alleged effect on certain butterflies.) Nor would my futurologist have witnessed the Third World famines of recent decades to ...

The Prodigal Century

David Blackbourn: Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century by John McNeill, 7 June 2001

Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century 
by John McNeill.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, August 2001, 0 14 029509 7
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... like the half-page on space junk or – more surprisingly – the three pages plus picture of Rachel Carson, under the sub-heading ‘environmental ideas’. The detail is often vivid (like the lions in London Zoo dying of smog-induced bronchitis), and McNeill has a dry sense of humour, perhaps a prerequisite for anyone writing on this subject. He ...

Perfectly Mobile, Perfectly Still

David Craig: Land Artists, 14 December 2000

Time 
by Andy Goldsworthy.
Thames and Hudson, 203 pp., £35, August 2000, 0 500 51026 1
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... its renewable resources,’ we recognise notions from green thinking. The dismaying findings of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring are ingrained in us now. So, positively, are Darwin’s demonstrations of how life works, how its ‘self-developing energies’ unfold, in that unobtrusive phrase from his diary which at once disposes of all that is ...

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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... until 1943, on the grounds that it was a threat to health (this put him twenty years ahead of Rachel Carson, who published Silent Spring in 1962); the doctors who supported the ‘new German science of healing’ at a meeting in Nuremberg in May 1935 did so because they opposed what they called ‘alienation from nature’. By the time David Brower ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... the number of dead birds on campus led him to demand an investigation into DDT (a decade before Rachel Carson), and then to Harvard Law School, where he scraped by, never unpacking his boxes, consuming huge meals of yankee pot roast and strawberry shortcake, disappearing on long hitchhiking trips, reappearing the night before an exam. What really ...

Diary

Kathleen Jamie: In the West Highlands, 14 July 2011

... Water and its like seem quaint, if not impossible. In 1962, two years after Ring of Bright Water, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. It made clear how an act here – spraying with DDT to control insects – had a dire effect there: weakening the shells of birds’ eggs. It was at once a plea, a scientific observation, and a call back from the ...
Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story 
by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers.
Little, 306 pp., £17.50, May 1996, 0 316 87546 5
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... by Al Gore, in which he compares the work to that classic of the environmentalist movement, Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, published some thirty years ago. Carson analysed the toxic effects of the spreading use of industrial chemicals, showing how these were accumulating in the soil, as well as in animal ...

Dressed in Blue Light

Amy Larocca: Gypsy Rose Lee, 11 March 2010

Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee 
by Noralee Frankel.
Oxford, 300 pp., £12.99, June 2009, 978 0 19 536803 1
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Gypsy: The Art of the Tease 
by Rachel Shteir.
Yale, 222 pp., £12.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 12040 0
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... LuPone is involved. Both Stripping Gypsy by Noralee Frankel and Gypsy: The Art of the Tease by Rachel Shteir struggle, much like their subject, to escape Rose’s heavy shadow – ‘the musical’s premise that the only moving force in Gypsy’s rise to fame was her mother is an illusion that needs to be stripped,’ Frankel writes. They are important ...

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