Less than a year after "Silent Spring" was published in 1963, Rachel Carson found herself testifying before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides.
What almost no one knew then was she was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel.
Her book, published 50 years ago this month, has changed history and continues to be a source of hot debate today. It has also influenced the environmental movement as no one had since Henry David Thoreau's "On Walden's Pond."
Read about it
here.