Middle-Grade Biography: Rachel Carson

From Penguin.com

Biographies are hard - lives are messy and some details of a person's life may not be appropriate or of interest to middle-school-age students. The Up Close series from Viking and Penguin has chosen some interesting subjects, some already well known but others not frequently covered in books for this age, which tend to be either pop-culture throwaway publications or something a kid would only read for a report. The books in this series are generally well written and can be either independent reading books or as a resource for a biography.

One I'm reading now is about Rachel Carson, the author of the ground-breaking 1962 book Silent Spring, which brought the problems of overuse of pesticides to the attention of the American public. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency is often said to have been inspired by Carson and the movements that sprang up  in the wake of the publication of Silent Spring. I have to confess to never having read that book, and having been only vaguely aware of Rachel Carson and her work. A good young adult biography is often the right amount of information for this adult!

Some of the other Up Close biographies are about Robert Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Thurgood Marshall, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oprah Winfrey, Ella Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Jane Goodall, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ronald Reagan.