Creatively, “Undersea” was unlike anything ever published before — Carson brought a strong literary aesthetic to science, which over the next two decades would establish her as the most celebrated science writer of her time. Conceptually, it accomplished something even Darwin hadn’t — it invited the reader to step beyond our reflexive human hubris and empathically explore this Pale Blue Dot from the vantage point of the innumerable other creatures with which we share it. Decades before philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his iconic essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” and nearly a century before Sy Montgomery’s beautiful inquiry into the soul of an octopus, Carson considered the experience of other consciousnesses. What the nature writer Henry Beston, one of Carson’s great heroes, brought to the land, she brought first to the sea, then to all of Earth — intensely lyrical prose undergirded by a lively reverence for nature and a sympathetic curiosity about the reality of other living beings. After 10 years of uneventful river habitation, the eels are drawn by instinct downriver returning to their place of birth, a deep abyss near the Sargasso Sea where they will spawn and die. It is the most remarkable journey, as is that of the newborn spawn originating from two continents, who float side by side and drift towards those same coastal rivers their parents swam from, a voyage of years and over time the two species will separate and veer towards their continent, the US or Europe.

Under the Sea-Wind was in the works since 1937 when Carson’s essay Undersea, published by Atlantic Monthly, caught the attention of Simon & Schuster who suggested she expand it into a book. Undersea is a narrative about the creatures on the ocean floor. It was originally material for the radio brochures of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries based on her research on marine life at Chesapeake Bay. Though it is primarily a story, it is grounded in scientific detail of each creature’s appearance, diet and behavior. Most other writers would move on from these transcendental tide pools, but not Carson. Lying down beside another one, a “miniature pool” lined with tiny mussels whose “misty blue” shells seem like “distant mountain ranges,” she tries to see the reflecting surface itself: Incidentally, it may be remarked that in recent years biological study has shifted largely from that of preserved specimens to that of animal communities, and Under the Sea Wind is one of the first popular books to present this newer knowledge to the layman. Included in the book are several artistic plates and an illustrated glossary with descriptions of more than a hundred plants and animals of the sea. a b Arvidson, Adam Regn (26 September 2011). "Nature Writing in America: The Power of Rachel Carson".In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), James wrote, “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting.” W hen the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known? They leave in their wake a cloud of transparent spheres of infinitesimal size, a vast, sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky as the Milky Way. There are known to be hundreds of millions of eggs to the square mile, billions in an area a fishing vessel could cruise over in an hour, hundreds of trillions in the whole spawning area. Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature. Although famous today for Silent Spring, Rachel Carson had already made her name decades earlier. During the 1930s, as a young zoologist specialising in marine ecology, she helped pay the bills with a series of essays which appeared in newspapers such as the Boston Globe and attracted widespread praise. These led, in turn, to several books about the ocean, of which Under the Sea-Wind was the first.

By giving clear expression to the interrelatedness of land, air, sea and the pull of sun and moon, The Sea Around Us transcends mere nature writing and becomes a work of ecology. This is no accident; Carson is concerned that we take action to protect these delicate ecosystems and realises that to encourage this she needs to help us understand their importance to us and to everything else. Knowledge here is not celebrated just for itself but as a key to what Buddhists might call "right action". Her quiet call to arms is summed up in these words: "It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself." Next comes Under the Sea Wind and that positioning surprised me. This book is much more poetic in style, much more literary in feel that all of her other work that I have read. SO it took a bit of a mind leap to move from the cadence of the first book to the second. When you read it it right way though it is breathtaking, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved. Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.to make the sea and its life as vivid a reality for those who may read the book as it has become for me during the past decade. As a youngster, Carson wanted to be a writer, a poet even. University and a job with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service turned her into a marine biologist with a passion for the sea and an urge to share it. In The Sea Around Us she marries her early ambition with her skills as a researcher and synthesiser. She ranges over the fields of geology, palaeontology, biology and human history, combining the scientist's eye for detail with the poet's feeling for rhythm and clarity of expression. The book's commercial success enabled Carson to leave her job and dedicate her life to independent research and writing. One result of this independence was The Edge of the Sea, the book that completed the Sea trilogy and which moves the beach walker's gaze from the sea before them to the sand and stones beneath their feet. The second outcome was the writing of Silent Spring, Carson's most famous book and one which was instrumental in both the banning of DDT and the crystallisation of 1960s environmentalism. Without The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring might never have been written. Upon reading the book one has the feeling of being an invisible spectator of an eternal drama that began million of years ago and which promises to continue indefinitely, heedless of man and his exploitation of the continents. It is the same feeling one achieves when alone on a starry night he gazes upward into the immensity of space.

It can be challenging to read what we are so accustomed to seeing visually. However, Carson's narration is spectacular, taking the reader through ecosystems with the animals themselves as characters. I would say that Caron's writing actually eclipses nature film: it allows to push deeper beyond the exciting, shimmering tilt of a school of fish to contemplate the entirety of Nature's magical production, past, present and future. The grebe soon drowned. Its body hung limply from the net, along with a score of silvery fish bodies with heads pointing upstream in the direction of the spawning grounds where the early-run shad awaited their coming. Horned Grebe. Via Wikimedia.Under the Sea-Wind reveals Carson’s literary genius. Through clear language, personification, and vivid description, she brings the ocean to us on land. Under the Sea-Wind is the deepest immersion in the sea without going scuba diving. Note how the grandeur increases as the sentence gathers rolling force and weight, climaxed by its two four-syllable adverbs. The chapter’s final paragraph ends with another poetic summation—impossible not to quote!—of how much remains unknown about the great ocean around us: Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind—Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers. Quaratiello, Arlene. Rachel Carson: A Biography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 26–27. ISBN 0-313-32388-7.

I had never heard of marine zoologist Rachel Carson. I bought her book 'On The Edge Of The Sea' in a 2nd hand bookshop in a bunch of other random Natural History because I liked the cover. After OTEOTS I read 'The Sea Around Us', and most recently 'Under the Sea Wind', the subject of this review. The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two thousand pound killer of the seas. And of the hundred foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands may scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way. And it is becoming of the flowering of astronomical numbers of these diminutive plants known as diatoms, that the surface waters of the ocean are in reality boundless pastures. Those who dwell … among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.Wheeler, J. C. (2013). Rachel Carson: Extraordinary Environmentalist. Minneapolis, Minn: Abdo Publishing. In Under the Sea - Wind, Rachel takes us onto a magical journey of the ocean in a way that we will never experience it, she shows us it's seasons, it's rivers and tides, it's restless energy and the struggle of life within the intense world of the ocean. The way she does it is quite unique. John Updike once said of Nabokov’s style, “He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically.” I think Carson does the same. Listen to her evocation of another tide pool near the one described above. It’s an even more complex aesthetic experience: The third book was The Edge of the Sea in which we are, once again, in practical ecology style writing. In many ways it feels more like a textbook that the first book, even, because there are long lists of animals to get through at times. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...