Under the Sea-Wind

by Rachel Carson, Linda Lear (Introduction)

Rachel Carson--pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring--opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea.

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. Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea--its limitless vistas and twilight depths--Carson's astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Science, Environment, Ecology, Classics, Animals

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.

Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides, and it inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A variety of groups ranging from government institutions to environmental and conservation organizations to scholarly societies have celebrated Carson's life and work since her death. Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in her honor the following year; several other countries have since issued Carson postage as well.

Carson's birthplace and childhood home in Springdale, Pennsylvania — now known as the Rachel Carson Homestead—became a National Register of Historic Places site, and the nonprofit Rachel Carson Homestead Association was created in 1975 to manage it. Her home in Colesville, Maryland where she wrote Silent Spring was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991. Near Pittsburgh, a 35.7 miles (57 km) hiking trail, maintained by the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, was dedicated to Carson in 1975. A Pittsburgh bridge was also renamed in Carson's honor as the Rachel Carson Bridge. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection State Office Building in Harrisburg is named in her honor. Elementary schools in Gaithersburg, Montgomery County, Maryland, Sammamish, Washington and San Jose, California were named in her honor, as were middle schools in Beaverton, Oregon and Herndon, Virginia (Rachel Carson Middle School), and a high school in Brooklyn, New York.

Between 1964 and 1990, 650 acres (3 km2) near Brookeville in Montgomery County, Maryland were acquired and set aside as the Rachel Carson Conservation Park, administered by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. In 1969, the Coastal Maine National Wildlife Refuge became the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge; expansions will bring the size of the refuge to about 9,125 acres (37 km2). In 1985, North Carolina renamed one of its estuarine reserves in honor of Carson, in Beaufort.

Carson is also a frequent namesake for prizes awarded by philanthropic, educational and scholarly institutions. The Rachel Carson Prize, founded in Stavanger, Norway in 1991, is awarded to women who have made a contribution in the field of environmental protection. The American Society for Environmental History has awarded the Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation since 1993. Since 1998, the Society for Social Studies of Science has awarded an annual Rachel Carson Book Prize for "a book length work of social or political relevance in the area of science and technology studies."

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_C...

Reviews

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book started out as an assignment she completed in 1936, when she was an unemployed zoologist and freelance writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Asked to write an introduction to a brochure on marine life, she submitted an essay entitled “The World of Waters” neatly typed by her mother, as all her manuscripts would be.

The next day Carson sat in Higgins’s Washington D.C. office waiting for his verdict.The government ichthyologist knew at once that it was unsuitable. What he was reading was a piece of literature. Carson never forgot the conversation: ‘My chief…handed it back with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I don’t think it will do,’ he said. ‘Better try again. But send this one to the Atlantic Monthly.’

The essay was a narrative account of the countless sea creatures that cohabit in and underwater and introduced her two most enduring and renowned themes: the ecological relationships of ocean life that have been in existence for millenia and the material immortality that embraces even the tiniest organism. It was the essay that spawned a classic in nature literature.

Under the Sea-Wind is structured in three parts, and in each part, we view the sea and sea life from the point of view of one of its inhabitants.

In Part One, Edge of the Sea, written for the life of the shore, and inspired by a stretch of North Carolina sea-coast, we meet a female sanderling she names Silverbar, it is Spring and the great Spring migration of shore birds is at its height and concludes with the end of summer where the movements of birds, fish, shrimp and other water creatures heralds the changing of the seasons.

She describes the terror of the shore birds as they hide in the beach grass from the noisy, boisterous migrating flocks that briefly occupy their territory; the terrible snow storm that will freeze hundreds of egg embryos, where only the fittest and strongest survive; the way the birds lure a fox away from their nests and the day the parents finally abandon their young, their job complete.

Part Two The Gull’s Way, is dedicated to the open sea, a parallel time period in the open ocean and here we encounter Scomber the mackerel, following his journey from birth through infancy and youth in a quiet New England harbour, only to join a school that follows its instinct into the great sea where numerous predators await. As the fish move from one location to the next, trying to outwit predators, including man, the sea becomes the scene of a thriller and Scomber the mackerel, our fugitive!

Part Three River and Sea is written in the deepest, darkest, fathoms, we follow Anguilla, the eel from the far tributaries of a coastal river pool, downstream to the gently sloping depths of the sea, ‘the steep descent of the continental slopes and finally the abyss’.

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.

Rachel Carson writes about the sea, the sand, the birds, fish and the smallest of creatures and organisms in a way that makes us realise how little we observe of what is occurring around us, though we may stand, swim, float or fish in the midst of it. For the sea, its shore and the air above thrum like a thriving city of predator and prey of all sizes and character, constantly fluctuating, its citizens ever alert to when it is prudent to move and when it is necessary to be still.

Original, enthralling, it opens our eyes to much that we do not see or understand, I am in awe of shore birds, mackerel, eels, the sea, streams, rivers, ponds and the interconnectedness of them all.

My complete review here at Word by Word.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having recently read Silent Spring, I wanted more of the author's fantastic writing.

Nature writing at its best in vivid, lyrical prose. She writes about ocean and shore life so you feel you are there. The reader follows birds, fish, crustaceans and even eel! You follow an interlude in these creatures’ respective lives. It is utterly amazing the extent to which Carson makes the reader feel part of their aquatic existence. Violent storms, dense fog and lulling, lapping seas under blue skies. Predators and prey, the cycle of life to death to food and new life.

Carson assigns names to the creatures. Often she uses the scientific names of species as character names. It is a great technique and coupled with her engaging writing you follow each one with rapt interest. I thought this would be childish but it wasn't. The vocabulary is too advanced and the scientific details too plentiful for the lines to feel childish. Everybody, even expert naturalists, will learn something new.

I was continually drawn to searching the web to view the animals. The original book is illustrated. I listened to the audiobook narrated by C.M. Hébert. It was very good. It is slowly read, and it should be! This allows the listener to marvel at the beauty of the prose. Some of the lines are exciting. I listened with trepidation as the mackerel (Scomber) was about to be netted. No, that just couldn't happen! Even the glossary at the end captivates.

My only reservation in recommending this book is that it fits best those who appreciated nature writing

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of palely gleaming sky that laid a bright path across the water from island beach to horizon. Both water and sand were the color of steel overlaid with the sheen of silver, so that it was hard to say where water ended and land began.

That's just beautiful, right? This is the opening paragraph in a 200 page work that continues in a similar tone - a naturalist's objective view of a subject matter both readily familiar and wholly loved. Carson created this work over a ten year span of studying coastal marine life from North Carolina up to the Arctics; she anthropomorphizes the life span of a mackerel and an eel (giving the character names, even) to pinpoint the beauty and the violence of life. The narrative feels reminiscent of everything Attenborough produced for the last 50 years.

As I was finishing this book I was reflecting on how much of Carson's writing I found familiar - and then it dawned on me just how much of the world does not live close to the coast; how many people have never witnessed anything she describes first-hand. To them this book must feel like reading a piece of science fiction describing another world.


Stinson Beach, California

7th book read of 500 Great Books by Women

[Britta Böhler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderous!

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a magical, enthralling book.

Rachel Carson, worked as a marine biologist for the US Bureau of Fisheries and from a work related article, Under the Sea-wind grew and was her first book. Published in 1941 (I think) it was no great success, but ten years later came back on the scene with the publication to great acclaim, of The Sea Around Us. It is a bit scary to think that had she not kept writing this book might have been lost because I think it is brilliant!

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.

There are three books; the first introduces us to the edge of the sea through sea birds and their migration between America and their summer Arctic breeding grounds. The second takes us into the ocean and with the life of the fish, we migrate and grow with the Mackerel and learn the ways of the plankton. In the third part we explore the relationship between the rivers and the sea, through the life of an eel, that migrates to freshwater rivers to grow to maturity before returning to the ocean to breed. We get a lyrical description of the hazardous journey of Anguilla the eel, returning to the ocean.

The story manages the most delicate of balances imaginable; it shows us the danger, savagery and fury of the natural Atlantic world, fish and birds die, hunting and predation are not sugar coated in any way, but the telling is so meticulous that reading the ways of the sea is at worst bitter sweet and it never becomes depressing. Another tactic of the author is to give us one or two 'characters' to follow through the story. This is masterly, because much as I love reading about marine life, following an individual lets one immerse in the story rather than feeling as though one is reading a textbook.

So it is, that we follow Rynchops the black skimmer, Anguilla the eel and Scomber the mackerel and the beauty of this is that the author uses their Latin names, their 'real' names from a scientific point of view. In doing so, Rachel never tries to make the animals 'more human' for readers to emphasis better with them, rather she makes us, the reader, more like fish and birds, to swim and fly with them through their lives. I think that she does this so beautifully that any person, not just biologists, can be utterly charmed by this book.

There is a lyrical quality to the writing, and a whimsical element to associating so closely with the characters/animals that the book talks about. There is very little human perspective at all. It might be that this whimsical element is why this book was not an instant success. It does not have the strong, hard science bedrock of the other books by the same author, and it might have been that people first encountering it simply did not know whether to think of it a science, literature or 'nature writing'. To my way of thinking this book is all of those things, and so much more.

The one small sadness about reading it is that so much of the teeming, abundant life, the vigorous underwater communities are no longer what they were when this book was written. We see descriptions of gill nets and fishermen targeting migrating mackerel, certainly, but the world of this book no longer truly exists. Flash freezing, Sounder technology, factory fishing ships were not around when this book was written. Now they are. Some estimates suggest that some fish stocks in the Atlantic have been reduced by %90 since European settlers came to the Americas. How that came about can also be seen through the stories in this book: A fertile fishing ground no longer has three or four fishing boats; now there are dozens. A fisherman no longer brings his family down to the shore to help pulling the nets up; now it is automated and much more effective. These are the tiny glimpses into a world that is no longer, and an ecology that if not already gone, is dying.

However, for the most part, the take home message from this book is of the majestic complexity and awe inspiring beauty of the ocean Of it's waves and currents, it's tributaries and it's intoxicating beauty. I can't think of an author or a book that more perfectly captures my feelings of the soul of the ocean.

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If nature is a mystery, then Rachel Carson is a mystery writer. Under the Sea Wind, Carson’s first book (coming two decades before her landmark Silent Spring), is an astonishing journey through the ecology of the sea, the shore, and the air above. A marine biologist, Carson in Under the Sea Wind imaginatively follows the life cycles of several fish and birds as they navigate through and above the sea. Here we meet Rynchops the black skimmer, Scomber the mackerel, and Anguilla the eel (their names drawn from their Latinate scientific classifications). What could be sentimental if not downright silly (it’s so easy for writers to fall prey to anthropomorphism) is anything but: the only feelings Carson depicts in the fish and birds are fear and hunger—and the mysterious deep-in-the-blood instincts that drive some of them thousands of miles to return to spawning grounds or to migrate to seasonal “homes” beckoning them. Indeed, the ecological world Carson depicts is filled with constant danger, a world of never-ending interaction between predators and prey that only calms down a bit when predators are temporarily satiated after their kills. While narrating the lives of Under the Sea Wind’s “protagonists,” Carson introduces myriad forms of sea life with whom her central figures interact, from plankton up through Orcas, conveying fascinating biological information in prose that pushes toward and into the poetic. Central to the stories she tells is the ecological balance of the sea and its environs, a balance (as we now know 80 years after Under the Sea Wind’s publication) that is being destroyed by pollution, overfishing, and climate change.

Final word: an absolutely wondrous book. Your next trip to the beach or on the water will never be the same.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Free download available at FadedPage

The special mystery and beauty of the sea, which Rachel Carson caught and translated so memorably in _The Sea Around Us_, is again brought before the reader as the backdrop for Miss Carson's portrait of the birds and fishes that inhabit the eastern rim of our continent. In a series of descriptive narratives unfolding the life of the shore, the open sea, and the sea bottom, the author begins with the deep hush of a spring twilight along the North Carolina coast where the night-sounds of the water are the only intrusion on the stillness.

I made the smooth-reading of this book for Distributed Proofreaders Canada and it will be published by FadedPage.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.
    It reads almost like a nature documentary, a narrative description (illustrated with pencil sketches by Howard Frech) of the wildlife of the western Atlantic and adjacent coastline. More nonfiction than fiction, it has no plot - unless you count the tumultuous births, lives and deaths of the natural world itself as the plot. It is, though, filled with characters: Silverbar the sandpiper, Scomber the mackerel, Anguilla the eel, and what Carson gives us is an utterly realistic impression of both their lives - what it's actually like to be a shore bird or fish - and of the ecology of it all, how it all works, its interconnectedness (a more familiar idea nowadays than it was back in the 1930s). For me, one thing which came across particularly vividly was the small fry - copepods, shelled protozoa, the miniscule larvae of jellyfish and crabs - usually lumped together as 'plankton'; it's like peering down a microscope tube at a rich, bustling little world of jewel-like entities, a world exquisite and deadly in equal measure.
    Of course, this is a glimpse of the rivers and seas as they were back in the late 1930s, i.e. somewhere along the scale between the original pre-human superabundance and today's polluted and almost fishless wastes; reading this, I found myself hoping that Carson can't see from beyond the grave what has been done to the oceans she loved.
    And that is what comes across here most clearly of all: how much she loved the sea and everything that lives in it - it shows in every sentence, page after brilliant page. One reason the prose is so good is that every line was read out loud, for its rhythm, as she went (I don't really use audiobooks, but I can imagine this being a stunning listen). It also changed my picture of the author: from here on I'll think of Rachel Carson, only second as a scientist and environmental inspiration, first and foremost as a world-class author.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before David Attenborough and nature television, there was Rachel Carson. What's so phenomenal about this 1941 book was that it was her first, published when she was in her mid-30s.

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.

An illustrative passage: "Here in the red clay, in the darkness and stillness, lies all that remains of ancient races of sharks that lived, perhaps, before there were whales in the sea; before the giant ferns flourished on the earth or ever the coal measures were laid down. All of the living flesh of these sharks was returned to the sea millions of years before, to be used over and over again in the fashioning of other creatures, but here and there a tooth still lies in the red-clay ooze of the deep sea, coated with a deposit of iron from a distant sun."

[Kerri Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say about Rachel Carson that hasn't already been said? Every page she ever wrote is a page I want to swim in. This book is an ocean unto itself, and in my opinion should be required reading in schools, offices, and fishing boats everywhere, if only to help all of us really come to terms with the utter interdependency of oceanic (and all) ecosystems.

It feels so apt that I stumbled into this quote of Carson's right after finishing this book: "The winds, the sea, the moving tides are what they are...If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

The edition I read features lovely pencil illustrations and a wonderful 34-page glossary at the end that greatly appeals to my oceanic nerd heart.

[Five stars for relentless movement, stunning seas, and for so much we need to understand to help our oceans survive us.]

[Paulfozz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lyrical exploration of the wildlife of the eastern United States over the space of a year, mixing prose and science in a way reminiscent of the later books by Richard Fortey. Rachel incorporates elements of children's books in her way of naming animals and following their individual lives, yet this is just one aspect weaving through a poetic yet scientifically rigorous description of these coastal waters and of the abyss looming off-shore. Taking the perspective of the animals themselves allows the reader to immerse themselves into the waters, to ride the winds to the arctic with the flocks of migrating birds and to dive deep into the black depths with the young eels. The sense of connection with the wild is strong within these pages.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under the Sea Wind is among the best nature writing I’ve ever read. It must be the closest thing to watching a David Attenborough documentary if this had been written rather than filmed.

The book is organised in different sections covering coastal and marine life in the eastern rim of the American continent. We follow seabird migrations from Patagonia up to the Arctic, the life in the deep sea and the mysterious life of migratory fish that use both freshwater and the ocean to complete their life cycles.

But much more than facts and accurate information, this book conveys a sense of wonder about the natural world that is not easy to find. Although a bit demanding because of the rich vocabulary, this was a totally rewarding read.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably beautiful. Its another of those books which demand to be read out loud. An extraordinary description of the life of rivers and seas. A prose love poem, you might say, to mother nature. If you love being inspired, then read this one.

[Rosamund · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something quite entrancing about this book.

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. In fact, it was such a word lullaby that I was falling asleep on the final page until I got to the last paragraph, which woke me right up again.

[August Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

With just four books in her lifetime — her sea trilogy and Silent Spring — Rachel Carson set the standard for environmental writing in the twentieth century. This is Carson's first book, published inauspiciously in 1941, and not read much at all until the success of her later work. Somewhat unfortunately, the enormous success and enduring impact of Silent Spring has overshadowed her earlier sea trilogy, and the second volume in the trilogy, The Sea Around Us, is more widely read than the other two volumes, which includes this book and The Edge of the Sea. This is a shame, because Under the Sea Wind is a dazzling achievement as a riveting account of life along North America's east coast.

There are indelible characters throughout the book like Scomber the mackerel and Anguilla the eel, who Carson will stay with through multiple chapters as we follow their glorious and treacherous lives. In this way, Carson deftly layers a narrative structure into a book that could otherwise get lost in drifting around. Carson utilizes her signature poetic prose to share the wonder of these ecosystems and the circle of life. This passage captures the essence of the book, as well as Carson's talent for accessibly breaking down complicated systems:

“The ghost crab, still at his hunting for beach fleas, was alarmed by the turmoil of birds overhead, by the many racing shadows that sped over the sand. By now he was far from his own burrow. When he saw the fishermen walking across the beach, he dashed into the surf – preferring this refuge to flight. But a large channel bass was lurking nearby, and in a twinkling, the crab was seized, and eaten. Later, in the same day, the bass was attacked by sharks — and what was left of it was cast up by the tide on the sand. There the beach fleas, scavengers of the shore, swarmed over it and devoured it.”

At her best, Rachel Carson reminds us of our place in the universe, both of our smallness as well as our outsized impact on the ecosystems around us. She encourages us to commune with nature and appreciate the miracle of our existence on this precious planet. When Carson talks of deep time and makes cosmic comparisons, there is something sublime approaching religious rapture in her prose. She describes the sight of a school of mackerel shedding their eggs as "the sea's counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky as the Milky Way," (p 115). And she explains the red clay at the bottom of the Atlantic: "iron and nickel that had their origin on some far-off sun and once rushed millions of miles through interstellar space, to perish in the earth’s atmosphere and find their grave in the deep sea," (p 262).

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you liked this book, you might also enjoy:

✱ Waiting for Aphrodite
✱ A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
✱ Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
✱ Summer World: A Season of Bounty
✱ At the Water's Edge
✱ The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary
✱ The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

[Sharlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was Rachael Carson's first book coming out in 1941. What a magical read. You can travel with Scomber the mackeral from his birth as he grows and migrates. You'll know as much as a human can what it's like to travel throught the ocean and have close encounters with a constant array of predators. Or spend some time with Pandion and his osprey mate as the mate, migrate, nest, and care for their young. It's the closest I've ever felt to flying through the air. Their nest was 6 ft. across and more than half as wide at the top. In case you don't know what a dowitcher is(medium-sized, long-billed shore bird) there is an informative glossary at the back. If you love great writing and nature don't miss this. It is the beginning of a trilogy--The Sea Around Us(1951) & The Edge of the Sea(1955). I can hardly wait to open the next one!!

[Kendrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel Carson’s a seminal figure in eco literature, especially for her book Silent Spring. Before being known as a writer, she was a marine biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and she analyzed and reported on fish populations and wrote brochures for the public. In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted and published an essay titled “Undersea” which her supervisor had turned down for a bureau brochure (it was too good for the purpose). She was then approached by Simon and Schuster to expand and write a full book, and her first book, Under the Sea Wind, published in 1941.

While the publication was poorly timed (the US would soon enter the world war), Under The Sea Wind was critically praised and Carson would go on to write two more books to complete her Sea Trilogy. Under The Sea Wind is split into three sections: Edge of the Sea, The Gull’s Way, and River and Sea. Each section loosely follows a specific animal – a sanderling named Silverbar, a mackerel named Scomber, and Anguilla, an eel – across a full year of their life. The book fictionalizes the animal world to some degree to allow readers to follow along, for example giving names to animals or using language more suited for human behaviour. In one example, White Tip, a bald eagle, is described as living “as a pirate” who stole fish from other birds. Yet, the sustained attention that Carson brings to these animals, watching as they birthed and grew, fed and escaped hunters, travelled and mated, gives a sense of vitality and connectedness that a more factual writing style would lack.

The result of Carson's choices is the personification and vividity of the teeming biomes that her writing looks at. Carson’s deep knowledge and research on the subject means she is able to name and describe the numerous species in the ocean and rivers engagingly. While I live near the ocean and have a hobbyist’s appreciation of nature myself, I found Carson’s writing insightful and surprising. I was drawn to her depictions of marine life and how various animals gave birth – her most sustained passage on this, “Birth of a Mackerel”, is highlighted copiously. Elsewhere, when she makes a brief exit from the animal perspective into a fisherman’s, Carson offers a beautiful, doubled vision of marine life:

The fish were nervous, he could tell. The streaks in the upper water were like hundreds of darting comets. The glow of the whole mass alternately dulled and kindled again to flame. It made him think of the light from steel furnaces in the sky.

There is an Edenic view towards nature in Carson’s early work. Where Silent Spring is cynical and analytical about mankind’s impact of nature – having recognised the damaging harms of DDT pesticides and now sounding the proverbial alarm – Under the Sea Wind is written so that the fishermen are holders of generational knowledge of marine behaviour. Their fishing and hunting of animals are simple facts of life. Well-written, Carson's first book would make a great gift to those who would like to know more about the oceans and its myriad forms of life.

[Laura Hoffman Brauman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of pallet gleaming sky that laid a bright path across the water from island beach to horizon. Both water and sand were the color of steel overlaid with the sheen of silver, so that it was hard to say where water ended and land began.”

Rachel Carson is most well known for Silent Spring, but this was her first work - and the writing is beautiful. It’s a lyrical exploration of the sea - from the tides to the marine life to the sea birds. Such exquisite writing and reading it felt meditative. She managed to write about the marine life in a way that felt like you were connected to their experiences and it created a sense of wonder about the world you don’t see when looking from the shore. I think the thing that stood out the most to me in reading this was the diversity of life under the surface of the water and how interrelated everything is. I read this while sitting near the Pacific instead of the Atlantic, but it transported me to the marshes on the coast of South Carolina when reading.

[Maria Ripoll Cera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una maravilla de libro para los amantes de la naturaleza. Su autora, bióloga, describe con tanta exactitud la vida en el mar y los ríos, con tanta poesía, que dan ganas de convertirse en caballa o anguila. Y desde luego de hacer ahora mismo la maleta rumbo a la costa de Nueva Inglaterra y Nueva Escocia.
Lo mejor de este tipo de libros es que te convierten en otro tipo de viajero, un viajero amante de la naturaleza, a la que conoce cada vez más.
Absolutamente recomendable. Para leer de a poco.

[Annaliese Dorchinecz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly unlike any other book I have read. Rachel Carson is such an icon, this writing was so beautiful & informative & attentive. Made me understand & appreciate the ocean so deeply.

[Benedetta Troni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel Carson madre di tutti i biologi marini!

[Cliff Davis]

1941.


A Great Depression still fresh and raw. A world plunging into war.


It was not a propitious time for a writer to enter the literary world, with a book that follows the life-story of a sanderling (seabird), a mackerel and an eel.


Rachel Carson was 34 that year, and though that book, “Under the Sea Wind,” won praise, it didn’t sell well. A decade would pass before the sequel, “The Sea Around Us,” became a best-seller and brought attention back to her first work. And 11 more years went by before she published her magnum opus, “Silent Spring,” thrusting her into a storm of controversy that has not abated to this day. There are some who blame her, for her role in eliminating what had been a successful agent, the pesticide DDT, against the mosquitoes that cause deadly malaria.


Who was this woman? Pennsylvania-born, raised on a 65-acre farm near Springdale, north of Pittsburgh. A lifelong naturalist, stemming from a childhood spent exploring that landscape. A brilliant intellect – the first woman, in 1936, to pass the U.S. Civil Service Test. A gifted writer, who was not only readable, spinning prose of great beauty, but also able to seamlessly work in her copious scientific knowledge.


According to environmental engineer and Carson scholar H. Patricia Hynes, "Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically."


I imagine Rachel somewhere along the Atlantic coast, sometime in the late 1930s, the ocean breeze tussling her hair, salt spray in her face, learning firsthand what a trawl and a gill net are, and all the other terminology of the fishermen; learning the names of the seabirds that dived and soared around her – sanderlings, skuas, jaegers; and of course, learning all the mysterious creatures that live in the waters below.


I am a hurried reader, of necessity. This book should have been enjoyed on a beach somewhere, with that same ocean breeze in my face and the calls of those seabirds in my ears – not in sips at stoplights, gulps on my lunch break and while fighting to stay awake late in the evening after work. But life is what it is.


Seventy-nine years after its first publication, has “Under the Sea Wind” stood the test of time? Should it still be sought out and read by a new generation? I say so. For me, it felt timeless, as if it could have been written yesterday, not in my grandmother’s youth. I found myself cheering for the plucky little mackerel, a diminutive hero who has too often come to my attention only as a lunch entree. I found the ominous reminders of man’s impact upon the sea-world, to be more relevant than ever. And Rachel’s powerful ending, a reminder that our land rose from the sea and the sea bides her time to take it back again, proves stunningly prophetic in our era of anthropogenic climate change and rising sea levels.


Where Rachel stood in the surf on some long-ago day, filling her mind with the details that she would pour into her books, the ocean is now an average of six inches higher and that rate is accelerating.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always thought that David Attenborough had a unique style of telling us about the secrets of the natural world, but I think this book is where it all comes from. It was written in 1941 by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist that was the first to use anthropomorfism to describe nature. Attenborough does the same and he does that very good, but he uses pictures while Carson only uses words. It all started with a pamphlet 'The World of Waters' that she had to write for her employer. He declared it unsuitable for the purpose, but he also thought it was great literature and advised her to propose it to the editor of a magazine. He published it and then she reworked it into this book. It was published in 1941 and almost immediately forgotten when Japan and America went to war. When Carson got famous with another book, The Sea Around Us, in 1951, this one was republished a year later, in 1952, to instant success. Carson combined a great literary talent to a scientific mind and wrote the first non-fiction work about nature that reads like a novel...and is correct in all its details. I read about this book in Patrik Svensson's The Gospel of the Eels, and it was as good as I hoped. It was the start of the interest in nature with Attenborough and the WWF as an apotheosis, but with this book it all started, and the adventures of mackerel and eel kept me glued to the pages.

[sofide · Rating 4 out of 5]

In them burned once more the fever of migration, consuming with its fires all other desires and passions.

This was lovely, beautifully written and, at points, quite painful. I'll be remembering the sun over the ocean, the little mackarels, the terns, and reading this as I watched the sunset over the cathedral of Manchester.

Thank you, Rachel.

[Rachel Lauto]

DNF at 50%. As an ecology book the descriptions were beautiful but it moved too slowly, while never supporting enough technical knowledge to feel like a good investment of time. As a narrative, the story was achingly slow and pedantic.

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

It will CHANGE the way you feel about MACKEREL, forever!

[Cody]

A mesmerizing meditation on the sea, at once expansive and deeply focused. Carson's narrative, lyricism, and vision here lay the groundwork for much of the wonderful nature writing to follow.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book transported me to the sea and I lived many lives through the eyes of fishes, birds and eels.