Letters to a friend

FOR most, Rachel Carson is one of the heroic founders of the environmental movement. The meticulous evidence she gathered proved that the pesticides that provided lush crops – and cut out the whining mosquito – also silenced the spring. Fragile egg shells collapsing around deformed bird fetuses could also be blamed on products that had proved a boon to farmers. Here, in Always Rachel (Beacon Press, pp 567, $35), you can discover how she viewed the world in her letters to her friend Dorothy Freeman.