The New York Times Book Review - Gal Beckerman
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. But her tone is also elegiac.
From the Publisher
Brox writes beautifully . . . Silence for her is a force of nature, awe provoking, like lightning, capable of electrocuting us and of illuminating the night." —New York Times Book Review "Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives 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: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. It is an unusual and useful approach . . . 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.” —Wall Street Journal [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.” —Publishers Weekly “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.” —Booklist “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.’” —Kirkus Reviews “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.” —Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World “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 extremes—silence as solace to the contemplative spirit, silence as punishment for the rebellious or merely unlawful—Brox 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.” —Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast —
Kirkus Reviews
2018-10-02
The nuances and complexities of silence.
Brox (Creative Writing/Lesley Univ.; Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010, etc.) 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. It's also a social history of buildings and people who inhabit them, primarily prisons and monasteries, and the silence, whether imposed or invited, that inhabits those within. The author begins with the history of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in 1829, it was largely inspired by Founding Father Benjamin Rush's belief in a "new kind of justice," the "silent and separate incarceration of criminals." The plan was to make prisons "as forbidding and repellent as possible." Throughout, Brox intimately imagines its first prisoner, Charles Williams, an 18-year-old black farmer, personally experiencing the horrors and sufferings of prison life. The author then transitions to a historical examination of the monastery and the monks who chose a life of voluntary imprisonment as a means to achieve a more spiritual life. Silence, monastic chants, and prayers were an integral part of their daily lives, as was community, something Williams was forbidden. A large part of the book explores the austere life and writings of the famous Trappist pacifist monk Thomas Merton and his life at Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani. Brox touches on many diverse topics, including the lives of nuns in monasteries and the horrific World War II bombing of the Monte Cassino monastery, and invokes many voices, including Dickens, Thoreau, Eugenia Ginzburg, a prisoner of Stalin's Great Purge, author Doris Grumbach, and Brox's "own most profound encounter with silence." She concludes that silence can be many things, from an unwelcome punishment or a "lifelong commitment" to a "deliberate inquiry" or a "last resort."
A perceptive and subtle meditation about a "true reckoning with the self."
