Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award,recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths. Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter more 

Snow in Midsummer, theatre review: Journey to another world There’s no escaping the fact that this is an unfamiliar style of drama, one that can appear rather awkward, says Fiona Mountford, but there is much here to give cause for celebration. It’s exceedingly pleasant, not to mention oh-so-unusual, to have almost no knowledge or expectations of a piece of drama beforehand. In our information-saturated culture, ignorance is very rarely thought to be bliss. Yet I knew little about this contemporary adaptation of a classic Chinese drama and was rewarded with a beguiling and unexpected evening. If you’re feeling brave, know only that this isn’t what we usually see on an RSC stage (which is no bad thing at all), book a ticket — and stop reading this review now. Welcome back. Snow in Midsummer is Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s take on Guan Hanqing’s 13th-century The Injustice Done to Dou E, a leading example of Yuan dynasty drama. It’s also the first offering in the RSC’s promising-sounding Chinese Classics Translations Project. Despite the modern updating, powerful fable-like qualities of another, sterner age resonate. The hunt for truth and justice— not to mention long-lost children — will not be halted more 

Los Angeles Is All In for the 2024 Olympics There was the private under-the-stars dinner on the grounds of a Beverly Hills mansion, a game at Dodger Stadium and a tour of this region’s extensive network of stadiums, arenas, parks and playing fields. The object of all this attention was the International Olympic Committee, which sent a delegation here this past week for one last look before deciding where to hold the 2024 Summer Games. Most cities have shunned the Olympics as too expensive. Not Los Angeles. This city, which has enjoyed a decided economic upswing in recent years, has embraced the Games with an almost unambiguous courtship that concluded with a flourish Thursday evening. And with Paris and Los Angeles the last two cities standing, it clearly has a very good shot at landing the Games when the committee votes in September more 

Admissions by Henry Marsh – the bestselling neurosurgeon reveals more Death haunts the pages of Admissions: the author’s fear of his own, and those of his patients. The book opens with two paradoxical epigraphs: “We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go” (Montaigne), and “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily” (La Rochefoucauld). Few of us prepare adequately for death, but Marsh quite literally has: he keeps a “suicide kit” at home of a few lethal drugs he has acquired over the years. His second neurosurgical memoir is transgressive, wry and confessional, sporadically joyful and occasionally doleful. It is in many ways a more revealing work than his bestseller Do No Harm, and the revelations it offers are a good deal more personal. Much will be familiar to admirers of that book – Marsh skilfully articulates the subtleties and frustrations of neurosurgery – but there is a deeper examination of death, and an angrier exposition of the shameful betrayal of the NHS by successive generations of politicians. The pleasure and the privileges Marsh used to enjoy in his work have evaporated, and he reflects on some of the reasons why. There is frank scrutiny of his “repressed and prudish” childhood, and an appraisal of what retirement might mean for a professional whose job has been his life. The book draws on more recent experiences than Do No Harm – in London, Texas, Ukraine, Nepal and with ambulance-chasing London lawyers (memorably described as “rooting in a great trough of insurance premiums”). When the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard met Marsh, and wrote about him for the New York Times, he was struck most by his openness and honesty. That honesty is abundantly apparent here – a quality as rare and commendable in elite surgeons as one suspects it is in memoirists more

Andrew Tyler, who has died aged 70, was a writer on the weekly paper New Musical Express (NME) during the golden age of rock journalism in the 1970s, but later turned his attention to journalism on social issues – including the treatment of animals – and latterly became director of the animal rights group Animal Aid. He worked for the NME from 1973 until 1980, and became part of a highly regarded team that included Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent. During that period he interviewed rock and pop greats, including Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, Stevie Wonder and Ray Davies. He also met Marianne Faithfull, who gave him a scoop – picked up on the front pages of the tabloids – in which she revealed that she had slept with three of the Rolling Stones. For a while Tyler embraced the rock’n’roll lifestyle, but by the mid-70s he was growing disillusioned with the drugs and narcissism, and so began to focus on more weighty social issues, notably what he called “the abuse of power by those who’ve got it, and the price paid by those at the bottom of the pile, who haven’t” more