Word: carson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...school had been invaded, and officials were banning brushes and putting coats in plastic bags to seal off the points of attack. Five nurses worked all morning on the heads of 600 children at the Rachel Carson Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., spending five to seven minutes per scalp, looking for signs of infestation. In the end, 12% of the students and 10% of the staff were sent home. It was the worst invasion of head lice in a long time. "In other years we have two, sometimes four cases of lice," says Laura Hart Silkwood, the principal. "This...
...particularly surprised. I admit to guilt as well--after talk of Earthly destruction from ozone depletion, toxic pollutants and every fruit, vegetable or meat, it doesn't take much effort or worry to add another potential hazard to the list of threats to the environment. What would Rachel Carson think of this new attitude...
...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...
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...
...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...