Join author Dyana Z. Furmansky to discover the extraordinary impact on the environmental movement by Rosalie Edge (1877-1962), the first American woman to achieve national renown as a conservationist. Furmansky draws on Edge's personal papers and on interviews with family members and associates to portray an implacable, indomitable personality whose activism earned her the names "Joan of Arc" and "hellcat." A progressive New York socialite and veteran suffragist, Edge did not join the conservation movement until her early fifties. Nonetheless, her legacy of what The New Yorker called "widespread and monumental" achievements forms a crucial link between the eras defined by John Muir and Rachel Carson. An early voice against the indiscriminate use of toxins and pesticides, Edge reported evidence about the dangers of DDT fourteen years before Carson's Silent Spring was published.

Dyana Z. Furmansky has written about the culture of the American West and reported on environmental issues for The New York Times, Audubon, High Country News, American Heritage, Wilderness, and other publications. In 1986 she was part of the High Country News team that won the prestigious George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting. Her previous book, These American Lands, published by Holt, was praised by the late Wallace Stegner as "the only indispensable narrative history of the public lands." Her latest book, Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists, was chosen as a 2009 Wormsloe Nature Book, and received the 2009 Colorado Book Award.

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