RACHEL CARSON'S WONDER-FILLED WORLD

A soaring tribute to the perceptive naturalist and writer who jump-started the modern environmental movement.

While tracing Rachel Carson’s all-too-brief life from early woodland walks with her mother, dog, and notebook to later fame as a bestselling nature writer with an unsurpassed ability to communicate her observations and concerns to wide audiences, Hannigan repeatedly appeals to readers to follow her example by using each of their senses in turn to see, hear, smell, feel, and taste the natural wonders that are all around. Finishing her final book, Silent Spring, became a race against time. Although she didn’t live to see the effect the book has had on successive generations (“It ignited a revolution,” the author writes, before going on to list some of the major legislative acts it prompted), some sense of its importance comes out in the historical note at the end. Substantial quoted passages from several of Carson’s works that ably capture her eloquent style are tucked into Hickey’s equally lyrical views of the young naturalist taking nature walks alone or with her young grandnephew (later co-author) Roger, wading in shallows, or sitting at her writing desk generating images of ocean wildlife in splashy floods. Her environmental concerns have only grown more cogent with time.

Vivid and perceptive.