On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson by William Souder

(Crown, $30)

It’s been 50 years since Rachel Carson “startled the world with a frightening warning about the overuse of synthetic pesticides,” said James P. Sterba in The Wall Street Journal. Silent Spring, published in 1962, was “meant to scare the bejesus out of people” about the toxic dangers of the chemical DDT, and it did. Already the author of three mild-mannered but best-selling books about marine biology, Carson inspired “a global environmental awakening” with her vivid polemic. If it’s a story you don’t know, William Souder’s “expansive” new biography is “the book to read” about Carson’s short life and career. It ably captures “the moment when the gentle, optimistic proposition called ‘conservation’ began its transformation into the bitterly divisive idea that would come to be known as ‘environmentalism.’”

Readers will find themselves rooting for Carson, said Emily Cataneo in CSMonitor.com. Corporate foes labeled her a fraud and even a communist, but Souder clearly admires her talent and conviction. He’s willing to concede that Carson’s tunnel vision might be the main reason that DDT became the cause célèbre of the environmental movement’s early days. But he makes clear that the chemical’s widespread use was a fitting emblem of a larger challenge: The dangers created by new technologies, including nuclear weaponry, weren’t threats only to other species but also to ourselves.

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Hindsight has vindicated Carson, said Elyssa East in the San Francisco Chronicle. Critics still blame her campaign for ending anti-malaria spraying programs in Africa and thus costing millions of lives, but she was correct in positing that humanity’s greatest challenge was to achieve “mastery not of nature, but of ourselves.” Though the life of a dogged writer “could make for a dull read,” Souder keeps things interesting, charting Carson’s unrequited love for a married woman as well as her struggle to answer Silent Spring’s detractorswhile losing a personal battle with cancer. Carson’s posthumous triumph “makes for an utterly inspiring tale.”