World Events

Abstract

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, $5) has hit the front page, the book review columns, the favorite radio hour, the television spotlight, the Book of the Month Club, the agricultural colleges and their poison-obsessed extension divisions, the chemical industry, and the Washington government with a terrific wallop. Not since Upton Sinclair's Jungle appeared, half a century ago, has a single book about the American scene made such an impression. Reviewers have even gone so far as to call Silent Spring "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the 20th century."

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