Cynthia Barnett to Speak at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Home

Cynthia Barnett brings her new book The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of Oceans to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home at the edge of Orange Lake.

Lauren Groff says the book is “as exquisite, many chambered and luminous as the shells Cynthia Barnett describes.”

Light refreshments, music, and a book signing will be followed by a discussion by the author. Free with basic park entry fee.

Sounds of the Sea is an epic, astonishing journey, from Neanderthals collecting cockles on the prehistoric coast of Spain to the native Calusas’ great cities of shells rising along the Florida peninsula to the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean where little cowrie snails were once turned into global currency. Whatever the time or place, Barnett illuminates the endless allure of seashells as objects of luxury or religious veneration.

Jack Davis (The Gulf) writes that this remarkable book “urges us to give seashells our ear in ways we never have before – their truth is our fate, their wisdom our answer, their future our hope.”

Cynthia Barnett is an award-winning environmental journalist; her work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal among many other publications. She is also the author of three acclaimed books: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History; Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis, and Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of Eastern America.

A fourth-generation Floridian, Barnett is currently the Environmental Journalist in Residence, University of Florida, Gainesville.