The sketch was used to create the CCCC.
Recommendations from the editors of Scientific American.
Credit: London Ladd.
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The Sea Trilogy was written by Rachel Carson.
The Library of America will be open in 2021.
Before Silent Spring was written, Rachel Carson was a marine Biologist and a prolific writer on the subject of the ocean. Between 1941 and 1955, she published a trilogy of best-selling books about the sea, which were so rich and descriptive that they verged on spiritual.
The Library of America re-released the book this winter as a single tome, and it's as satisfying to read as it ever was. Each book accomplishes that rare feat of popular science by crafting a narrative that is easy to understand and enjoyable to read.
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The first book in the sequence was under the Sea-Wind. The story line is unusual and inventive and takes the form of a succession of episodes seen through the eyes of nonhuman creatures.
This is a device more often found in children's literature, a signifier of a heavily animalized world, but Carson's intentions were in the opposite direction. She wanted her readers to feel like they were living the lives of sea creatures. Giving these animals names makes them the protagonists of their own stories, which in turn makes us invest more in the lives of other species. The tattered tundra wildflowers at the end of the summer are seen by readers as a sign that there is no need for bright petals.
The book was well received by critics but did not sell, and a few weeks after publication, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor ensured that all else was pushed away from public attention. It was a difficult time to be making your debut as a writer, and as a result, she faded back into obscurity as her ambitions were overtaken for a decade by her job at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
The Sea Around Us was published in 1951. It stayed in the best-seller charts for 86 weeks. The second book was a more conventional one, and offered accessible summaries of what was then the forefront of oceanographic science (fathograms, sonic sounding, hydrophonic recordings), while never losing that sense of almost mystical veneration for the interconnectedness of all things. It is possible that a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon, or a bed of seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal, is the result of something that happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea.
This sentence is typical of Carson's style: at once exact and expressive, with that same sense of zooming-out, joined-up thinking that would allow her to connect the disparate dots of the research into DDT as it existed in piecemeal form in the 1950s and 1960s.
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The reception The Sea Around Us received propelled it to literary celebrity. The book is packed with captivating detail, and on almost every page one finds a passage of uncommon beauty. The dated science adds to the enjoyment of the reader because it allows them to look at the ocean from a place of greater knowledge. The Breton prayer says that the sea is great and the boat is small.
The sea around us is an alien world where strange and fantastic creatures are found in its dark depths, their eyes atrophied or large, their bodies studded with phosphorescent organs. It is a place where mists of plankton swirl through shafts of sea-green light, where flying squid hurl themselves onto the decks of passing vessels. To read it is to confront how we have coexisted with a vast realm almost unknown beyond our own small circle of light.
In 1860, the crew of the Bulldog brought a sounding line up from a depth of 1260 fathoms, and 13 starfish were clinging to it. The deep has sent forth the long coveted message, as the ship's naturalist recorded it at the time, as if a space shuttle were now to return to Earth with unexpected stowaways onboard. There was more than one world down there.
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The echo sound of a phantom bottom was heard in 1946 and it appeared to hang between the ocean and the sea bed at a depth of around 1,500 feet. After being mistaken for a chain of islands, it was found to stretch across much of the ocean and was observed to sink into the depths during the day. The first detection of the deep scattering layer was in 1951, and it still has enough mystery to send a shiver up one's spine. The sentient ocean of Stanisaw Lem's 1961 sci-fi classic Solaris is what most brings to mind, as is the sense of being in the presence of an incomprehensible agenda.
The Sea Around Us is by far the most vivid of the three. The expanse of the great black deep is the strangeness of its subject matter. The third book, The Edge of the Sea, was set on the seashore, but it pales in comparison. The original illustrations by Robert W. Hines are included in this edition of the book, which is devoted to the most interesting crabs and seaweeds, crustaceans and barnacles.
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The third book is more of a field guide and was always intended as such, but it still has a flair that is characteristic of the author: snail shells arecoiled like a French horn and comb jellies move with "elusive moonbeam flashes." One rock pool is only a few inches deep, yet it holds all the depth of the sky within it, capturing and limiting the reflected blue of far distances.
If there was poetry in her books about the sea, it was not because she put it there, but because no one could write about the sea and leave out the poetry. Maybe. One can't help but think of the late night work that Carson did, crafting her perfect sentences with the precision of a jeweler. She was a scientist and also a follower of the sea. The books are devotional.
The sea is a wild place, according to Rachel Carson. She writes, "We have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp." I live on an island, but this had never occurred to me before. I look out my window and see the water for the first time after reading the Sea Trilogy.
In brief.
A History of Animals and Cultures is a book written by the author.
The University Press of the Johns Hopkins.
The relationship between humans and elephants has been documented by a historian, who writes with compassion for the mighty mammals and condemnation for our treatment of them. He captures the ache and pain of colonization and enslavement, but it is a sobering read at times. The book will appeal to people who are interested in the mythology of elephants and those who are interested in the liberation of all living creatures.
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Tom McCarthy wrote The Making of Incarnation.
Knopf, 2021.
Tom McCarthy's novel follows Mark Phocan, an employee of a motion-capture firm assisting with the special effects of a sci-fi film. As Phocan deploys the company's technology across contexts from war to sex, he becomes entangled in a mystery involving a fictionalized version of an industrial psychologist and engineer. These nested narratives are steeped in mysticism, linking time, light and energy to the nature of being.
Sara Plummer Lemmon was a botanist.
The University of Nebraska Press is out in 2021.
Sarah Lemmon was a frontierswoman. She nursed wounded Civil War soldiers, established the first library in Santa Barbara, and became a prolific botanical illustrator. She was credited with many scientific discoveries, but only for her discoveries with J. G. Lemmon and wife. In her portrait, writer Wynne Brown pays tribute to both her accomplishments and her verve and courage.
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The title of this article was "Recommended" in Scientific American.
The scientificamerican1221-70 is a journal.
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