Their lives - cowries, conchs, clams, moons, whelks, scallops - have created the beautiful shells and curio shop stuff that have fascinated humans and influenced human society since prehistoric times. Similar wonder, imagination, awe, and empathy for strange living creatures suffuses Barnett’s beautifully wrought homage to mollusks. It was researched and written before there was Technicolor, Jacques Cousteau, the aqualung, or underwater film. The luminous prose in Carson’s first book, Under the Sea-Wind, carries readers along the Atlantic seacoast with birds and bivalves, on epic avian migrations to the Artic tundra, to the lives beneath the waves of marine creatures - mackerel and mullets, cephalopods and sharks, eels and octopuses. With it, Cynthia Barnett has arrived, borne upon a Botticelli shell, as a true heir to Carson’s legacy. Rachel Carson would have loved The Sound of the Sea.
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