The 100 best nonfiction books: No 20 – Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

This passionate rejection of pesticides was dismissed by many as the work of an hysterical woman when first published. Now it is seen as a pioneering text in the environmental conservation movement

America is a society founded on the words of the Declaration of Independence, the arguments of writers like Tom Paine (the author of Common Sense), James Madison (co-author of the Federalist Papers) and ultimately on the US constitution and its 33 amendments. As a country largely made by lawyers and journalists through ink and paper, it continues to redefine itself through the English language. From generation to generation, its citizens, uniquely, turn to books and newspapers to argue for change.

Silent Spring is a classic of American advocacy, a book that sparked a nationwide outcry against the use of pesticides, inspired legislation that would endeavour to control pollution, and thereby launched the modern environmental movement in the US. The great nature writer Peter Matthiessen identified its “fearless and succinct” prose as “the cornerstone of the new environmentalism”. In a few limpid chapters, and fewer than 300 pages, Rachel Carson described the death of rivers and seas, the scorching of the soil, the annihilation of plant life and forests, the silencing of the nation’s birds, the perils of crop spraying, the poisoning of humanity (“beyond the dreams of the Borgias”) and the genetic threats posed by all of the above, especially in its carcinogenic manifestations.

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