The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; narrated by Kaiulani Lee | 2015; originally published 1951 | Recorded Books | Audiobook $ 22

Published in 1951, The Sea Around Us is one of the most remarkably successful books ever written about the natural world. Rachel Carson’s rare ability to combine scientific insight with moving, poetic prose catapulted her book to first place on The New York Times best seller list.
This classic work remains as fresh today as when it first appeared. Carson’s writing teems with stunning, memorable images – the newly formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky, the centuries of nonstop rain that created the oceans, giant squids battling sperm whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface, and incredibly powerful tides moving 100 billion tons of water daily in the Bay of Fundy. Quite simply, she captures the mystery and allure of the ocean with a compelling blend of imagination and expertise.

Here’s a classic of the science nonfiction genre, which I absolutely had to include on my to-read list for Classics Club. Rachel Carson is perhaps more well-known for her book Silent Spring, which made her a leader of the late-mid twentieth century environmental movement. She was actually awarded for her activism with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter — posthumously, unfortunately.

The Sea Around Us was published about a decade before Silent Spring. It draws on the author’s experiences as a marine biologist, but it’s so much more than simply a science-y marine biology book. This is the gorgeously told story of the formation and movements of our world’s mysterious yet essential-to-life oceans. Even if you know nothing about the sciences of biology or geology or oceanography, you can gain from this work a deep appreciation of the grandeur of this environment that makes up nearly three-quarters of the surface of our planet.

It is worth noting the book was written before several scientific discoveries were made and modern-day hypotheses established, such as the widespread acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. This means the first section of the book, which is about the formation of the planet’s oceans and the development of early life and its dispersal onto land, is imaginative and beautifully described but unfortunately based on outdated ideas. There are other little anachronistic artifacts of science history included in the story, narrative postulations that would have been quite different if the book had been written after things like the modern models of human origins out of Africa or anthropogenic climate change became consensus.

I also feel compelled to note that if you are particularly sensitive to incidental speech noise while listening to audio, specifically mouth clicks, you might like to find a different narrator or stick to the print version for this one. I mostly really enjoyed this narrator’s cadence and tone, and am not otherwise usually prone to irritation about natural voice variations, but in this instance those mouth clicks were so pervasive that they frequently became a distraction.

That said, I would recommend this book to just about anybody with even a passing interest in the ocean or ocean-adjacent nature topics. Outdated science aside, the prose is simply too exquisite to pass up.

Links:

• Rachel Carson biography from the National Women’s History Museum
• Rachel Carson resource guide from the Library of Congress

Publication information: Carson, Rachel. The sea around us. Landover, Maryland: Recorded Books, 2015. Audiobook.
Source: Public library, via Hoopla.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.