Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation-including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry-and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact life of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book.
Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.

Mark Hamilton Lytle is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Bard College. He is the author of America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (OUP, 2006) and coauthor of After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, Fifth Edition (2005), and Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, Fifth Edition (2004).