POET OF THE TIDE POOLS

By EUGENE LINDEN

Very few books change the course of history: Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations come to mind. And then there was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Published in 1962, it embedded a message about the folly of trying to conquer nature within an exposition about the dangers of pesticides to animal and human life. Despite the formidable opposition of the chemical industry, which ridiculed Carson as an overly emotional woman unqualified to judge the health effects of compounds like DDT, her thorough research and exquisite ability to turn dry science into evocative prose won the hearts and minds of the public, who made the book an enormous best seller.

Carson died of cancer less than two years later, at 57, but Silent Spring uncapped a wellspring of fears about the effects of heedless industrialization that still flows. A testament to her posthumous victory is the fact that the giant Monsanto Corp., which led the chemical industry's attempts to discredit her in 1962, today integrates environmental concerns into its strategic planning.

Now comes historian Linda Lear with Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Henry Holt; 634 pages; $35), a probing and scrupulously footnoted account of this extraordinary woman's life. Carson was a publishing oxymoron--a prodigy who published her first essay in St. Nicholas Magazine at age 11, and a late bloomer who found success as a writer only in her 40s. Through letters and interviews Lear reconstructs an early life in which Carson had to defer dreams of becoming a scientist in order to help support her family following the failed schemes of an ineffectual father and tragedies that befell hapless siblings. While she toiled as an editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she continually and futilely proposed pieces to magazines, ranging from the Atlantic to the Reader's Digest.

She was persistent, however, and kept reweaving the strands of her youth --a reverence for nature, great powers of observation and expression, and scientific exactitude--until finally a style that had previously been dismissed by editors as too poetic became celebrated as just poetic enough. When success finally arrived, with the publication of The Sea Around Us in 1951, it came as a tidal wave. Each of her four books became a best seller, and she won virtually every prestigious literary award, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Emotional intimacy came late to Carson as well. Lear's account delicately suggests that Carson discovered great passion only at 46, and with a married woman at that. Carson poured a lifetime's pent-up feelings into her letters and encounters with Dorothy Freeman, an amateur naturalist and Maine neighbor, who became her "white hyacinth for the soul." The two women recognized that, as Carson wrote, "our brand of 'craziness' would be a little hard for anyone but us to understand." Indeed, as Carson's cancer intensified, Freeman was sufficiently worried about the "implication" of their letters to beg Carson to destroy their correspondence.

At least some of the letters survived to resurface here, but Lear's treatment of Carson's romantic life is never prurient, and it helps fill out the portrait of a gifted and courageous woman who helped redefine the way humans look at their place in nature.

--By Eugene Linden