Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I like coffee, music and food when reading, so I tend to become a fixture at independent coffee shops and cafes. My current haunt is 24 Diner on Lamar Boulevard in Austin — partly because it’s located next to Waterloo Records and always has good music playing, heavy on Willie Nelson, Louis Armstrong, Grateful Dead, Arturo O’Farrill, the Smiths, Mavis Staples and Freddy Fender. The louder the music is playing, the better my mood and concentration.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Joseph Wood Krutch’s “Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays,” an uncommonly deep homage to Arizona’s most famous national park. Krutch had been drama critic of The Nation from 1924 to 1952, then moved to Arizona and came to see the canyon as an ethereal composition of endless themes and variations.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Edward Hoagland, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Wendell Berry, William Kennedy, Jane Mayer, Bill McKibben, Thomas Pynchon, Maureen Dowd, Cornel West, Suzan-Lori Parks, Amanda Gorman, Greil Marcus, Peter Baker, Jill Lepore, Andrew Sullivan, Jesmyn Ward, Ezra Klein, Michael Eric Dyson, Sandra Cisneros, Patti Smith, Tim Egan, John McPhee, Joy Harjo, Bob Dylan, Andrea Wulf, E. Ethelbert Miller, Colson Whitehead, David Quammen, N. Scott Momaday, Don DeLillo, Peggy Noonan, Annie Proulx, Terry Tempest Williams and Tim O’Brien. And while I have the forum, could somebody tell me why Elizabeth Gilbert didn’t win the Pulitzer for her flawless “The Signature of All Things”?
Your new book is about “Silent Spring” and Rachel Carson’s impact on public policy and the environmental movement. What led you to Carson’s work?
If you teach environmental history, as I do at Rice University, you can’t help grappling with Rachel Carson. But getting to write a book about her is a dream come true. Everything about her career is exemplary, but when she published “Silent Spring” in 1962, it was like Zeus hurling a lightning bolt into America’s political landscape. This wasn’t Theodore Roosevelt saving Muir Woods by presidential proclamation; this was someone telling parents that DDT and the other chemicals saturating post-World War II America were literally making their children sick — not to mention wiping out populations of eagles, hawks and fish. Bill McKibben perfectly describes Carson as the woman who knocked “the shine off modernity.” But her books helped jump-start a more sustainable way of living.
Besides “Silent Spring,” what other Carson books would you recommend?
Her brilliant sea trilogy: “Under the Sea-Wind” (1941), “The Sea Around Us” (1951) and “The Edge of the Sea” (1955). Sandra Steingraber has done a marvelous job of editing the trilogy into a single volume for the Library of America, and together they constitute the finest writing we have on ocean life. Another is “The Sense of Wonder,” in which Carson urges parents to help their children experience the pleasures of nature. Linda Lear and William Souder both wrote enlightened biographies of Carson that I highly recommend. If Carson were alive today, she would be telling everybody to read Patrik Svensson’s “The Book of Eels.”
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