In her lifetime, Rachel Carson published only four books. She was a careful writer and meticulous researcher, for one thing, and she worked as a government scientist until the success of books like Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us enabled her to turn to her own writing full-time. She also published several magazine pieces, many of which biographer Linda Lear gathers here, along with letters and journal entries. In one piece that is characteristic both of her modesty and of her wit, Carson remarks on her then-unusual status of being an "average-sized woman" and a scientist, one who had just become "a biographer of the sea." In another, Carson writes of the necessity of protecting shorelines from economic development that would hasten their erosion and subsequent destruction. Carson's many fans will take much pleasure in this anthology of her work. --Gregory McNamee --

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