[Concord library]

Gretel Ehrlich's path leads her to Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces in western China to climb Emei Shan, one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains. For Ehrlich, a practicing Buddhist, the climb is both a spiritual pilgrimage and a troubling encounter with a culture reeling from recent political history. Ehrlich visits Buddhist lamas who, until recently, were in hiding from the purges of the Cultural Revolution, and she travels to a panda refuge in the mountains northwest of Chengdu - in both cases trying to unravel the ultimate fate of these once-revered symbols. "All roads to paradise first pass through purgatory." In perhaps the most hair-raising car-trip narrative in recent travel literature, Ehrlich writes of her journey from the southwestern city of Kunming over the Burma Road and on to Lijiang - an isolated mountain town which does in the end fulfill Ehrlich's hopes for cultural and spiritual revival, and where she learns from an unlikely group of Naxi sacred musicians that "music is medicine" and that profound healing requires profound faith.

Rachel Carson, whose brave and lyrical Silent Spring set in motion the modern environmental movement, was an extremely private public figure. Her friendship with Dorothy Freeman was begun in 1953, when Carson was forty-six, after Freeman wrote to the already-famous author. Their friendship, formed around mutual love of the Maine seashore and on an almost immediate emotional recognition, quickly gained in intensity. The friendship with Freeman became Carson's most important emotional haven and her richest source of creative support during the last twelve years of her life. Always, Rachel is first of all a record of a moving, complex, and sustained friendship between two women. It is the first revealing autobiographical writing we have from Carson. . The letters span the writing of The Edge of the Sea and of Silent Spring. They illuminate the creative turmoil Carson underwent as she wrote, her moments of despair and then of calm assurance that she had done what she imagined doing, and her sense of destiny as a writer. Always, Rachel reveals for the first time the nearly crushing family and physical burdens under which Carson wrote Silent Spring - that she was dying of cancer as she was writing the book that was to change our view and use of environmental toxins.