Regardless how you feel about Carson's environmental views, please don't neglect her oceanographic books. I highly recommend them to anyone who loves science, the sea, and beautiful English prose. She was a grand lady and she will be missed.

"The Sea Around Us" - A survey of oceanography in mid-century, the science is somewhat dated, but it still holds up very well, fifty years later. National Book Award winner.

"Under the Sea Wind" - In depth (no pun intended) case study of the life cycles of three pelagic species. Narrow in scope, but highly detailed and exquisitely crafted, I know just how mackerals and eels think now.

"The Edge of the Sea" - A guide to intertidal life of the Atlantic Coast, somewhat comparable to Ricketts' "Between Pacific Tides", but "Edge" can be both used in the field as a guide, or simply read at home at one's leisure. It's that good. The book is organized around the four major ecozones of the Atlantic coast, rocky shore, sandy beach, coral reef, and mangrove coast.

An excerpt:
"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us -- a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself."