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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Religion & beliefs

SILENCE

Jane Brox

A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

With precision and grace, award-winning author Jane Brox examines the institution of silence from monastic communion with God to the punitive silencing of inmates.

In twelfth-century Provence, Cistercian monks took vows of silence for stillness and more profound meditation. This monastic tradition, along with European concepts of prison reform and the American Enlightenment, gave 19th- century social reformers high hopes for the capacity of silence to redeem and rehabilitate in a new system of incarceration. THE WAKE OF SILENCE explores the power of silence and our often fraught relationship with communication and solitude, and how this heritage has led us into an age in which quiet is increasingly difficult to come by. Jane Brox’s titles include BRILLIANT: The Evolution of Artificial Light (a Time Magazine top ten nonfiction book of 2010); CLEARING LAND: Legacies of the American Farm (in 2004 a Best Book of the Year: Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution); and FIVE THOUSAND DAYS LIKE THIS ONE, (a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction). She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Book Published 2019-01-01 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments

It is the great wit of this thoughtful book to juxtapose the silence of punishment with the silence of spiritual life and, in so doing, to deepen our understanding of each.

The nuances and complexities of silence. Brox moves from the openness and space found in her earlier, well-received books on farms to places far more confining. This poignant and somber book is as much about solitude as it is silence...A perceptive and subtle meditation about a 'true reckoning with the self.'

A thoughtful meditation on the power of silence...

[A] meditation that juxtaposes monastic and prison silence and solitude to explore silence's positive and negative aspects. Where one might expect a neat binarism between restorative and punitive silence, Brox skillfully resists depicting one as all good and the other as all bad, showing instead how silence designed to reform and redeem might instead oppress, and how silence designed to strip away attachments to ego and to temporal goods might also distill and reveal one's character. Brox's elegant, thoughtful survey of social deployments of silence introduces to readers the continuum of its potential harms and benefits.

Jane Brox's SILENCE gets the front page of the 2/24 issue of the New York Times Book Review, in a joint review with HOW TO DISAPPEAR.

Spanish (world): Ixchel Barrera at Paidós (Planeta Mexico)

Brox is intelligent and inquisitive as she intertwines investigations of the punitive role silence has played in the American penitentiary system and the monastic spiritual connection to God that solitude has provided throughout history. . . . All this makes for a fascinating read. . . . she leaves us wanting more - both of her writing and of the quiet.

Brox's balanced account shows both the positive and negative aspects of silence and points out the need to be attuned to our inner voice in a world of constant distractions.

After the assault of holiday social gatherings and their concomitant sorties of festive selfies, January seems the perfect time for Jane Brox's social history of silence to emerge. . . . one thing Brox illustrates is that silence is something we should discuss, even if within ourselves.

In her stunning new book, Silence, Jane Brox has once again taken a seemingly familiar subject and made it the focus of her laser-like attention and lyrical prose, bringing readers along on a journey of investigation they will never forget. Working from two extremessilence as solace to the contemplative spirit, silence as punishment for the rebellious or merely unlawfulBrox uncovers a history that both shocks and soothes. Silence is an uncommon book on an increasingly uncommon phenomenon, a gift to be treasured in the din of daily life.

With each skillful shift in her narrative, Brox reveals how easily silence has been woven into society, where it is used alternately as weapon and balm. Her ability to juxtapose prisons and monasteries, fear and peace is remarkable, and her graceful prose, which appears effortless, draws upon a wealth of research. This is history at its most effective: elegant, essential, and provocative.

[Silence] couldn't come at a better time. A wonderfully evocative writer with a knack for the illuminating detail, Ms. Brox explores the history and cultural meaning of silence through the story of a prison and a monastery . . . Ms. Brox's engaging book offers readers an opportunity to explore a few crucial moments of that history and, in the process, to ponder what silence - or its absence - tells us about the world we are making every day.

[A] clever bit of counterprogramming. Coming upon [Silence] was like finding the Advil bottle in the medicine cabinet after stumbling about with a headache for a long time . . . [Brox's] two settings, scrutinized intensely, present silence as many textured . . . Brox writes beautifully about the silence woven through daily tasks and between prayers in the medieval monastery . . . Silence for her is a force of nature, awe provoking, like lightning, capable of electrocuting us and of illuminating the night.