The Sea Around USarknotes
A female marine biologist and environmentalist named Rachel Carson wrote The Sea Around Us in 1951, which ended up in her winning a National Book award for a Non-fiction book and a John Burroughs award the following year. In this book she covers a wide range of topics involving our oceans in three parts. The first part, titled Mother Sea, Rachel Carson describes the history of how the seas formed, life on the surface and near the floor of the ocean, how the sea changes with the seasons, how islands are formed, and how seas come and go. Part two, titled The Restless Sea, talks about the oceans relationships with the wind, the earth’s rotation and the gravitational pull of the moon and sun on our tides. Part three, titled Man and the Sea About
…show more content…
Rachel Carson’s writing style is descriptive and imaginative, which is hard to get across in such an informational and dense book, yet she does. The reader can see her emotion on certain topics through her writing, such as when she is describing the first reptiles on earth as “gigantic” and “terrifying”(23) or as a sunfish as “grotesque”(233). Her imagery also comes through in the book like when she describes the accumulation of sediments on the ocean floor as “the steady, unremitting downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer” and “the most stupendous “snowfall’ the earth has ever seen” (102).In this book Carson addressed many issues. One of them was the problem of humans bringing foreign plants and animals to new lands, thus destroying the ecosystem and balance of the new land. She gave many examples of this destruction throughout history one being the story of the Laysan rail. These birds lived on the Pacific Island of Laysan. They were merely six inches high, flight-less, and had a voice of tinkling bells. In 1887, a ship captain introduced rabbits to this little island. The rabbits killed all the vegetation on the island and then died of starvation. The rails also died due to the lack of food and the world’s last rail was seen in 1944. Carson puts her own personal input and adds “In a reasonable world men would have treated these islands as precious possession, as
Rachel Carson’s writing style is descriptive and imaginative, which is hard to get across in such an informational and dense book, yet she does. The reader can see her emotion on certain topics through her writing, such as when she is describing the first reptiles on earth as “gigantic” and “terrifying”(23) or as a sunfish as “grotesque”(233). Her imagery also comes through in the book like when she describes the accumulation of sediments on the ocean floor as “the steady, unremitting downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer” and “the most stupendous “snowfall’ the earth has ever seen” (102).In this book Carson addressed many issues. One of them was the problem of humans bringing foreign plants and animals to new lands, thus destroying the ecosystem and balance of the new land. She gave many examples of this destruction throughout history one being the story of the Laysan rail. These birds lived on the Pacific Island of Laysan. They were merely six inches high, flight-less, and had a voice of tinkling bells. In 1887, a ship captain introduced rabbits to this little island. The rabbits killed all the vegetation on the island and then died of starvation. The rails also died due to the lack of food and the world’s last rail was seen in 1944. Carson puts her own personal input and adds “In a reasonable world men would have treated these islands as precious possession, as