... Brox hunkers down in two institutions dominated by the absence of noise — prison and the monastery — and leaves us with a much more ambiguous sense of silence: oppressive under certain conditions, liberating under others ... Brox writes beautifully about the silence woven through daily tasks and between prayers in the medieval monastery, its varying qualities and duration...
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. Those with an interest in prison reform should be particularly drawn to these thought-provoking pages.
... 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. It is an unusual and useful approach ... At times, Ms. Brox meanders from her principal narrative. While some of her tangents are illuminating, others are a distraction ... 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.
In Silence, Brox emphasizes that the potential of silence as an act of protest comes from the fact that it can’t be commodified ... What...Brox...[is] ultimately interested in is the suppression of ego. It’s easier to listen when you aren’t speaking, and it’s easier to envision your place within a broader landscape when you look outside of yourself ... Brox...give[s] us idealized examples of social withdrawal ... It’s unclear how someone with a greater number of social obligations—a family, a job—someone without the autonomy (or liquidity) that such solitude requires, might put these ideals into practice. Would it even be possible, in the midst of so much noise?
In Silence, an insightful social history, Jane Brox examines the experiences of individuals whose silence is enforced...a deeply-researched history ... [acknowledges] the possibility of redemptive healing by escaping silently from a noisy, insistently distracting world into one’s thoughts, memories, and observations. There may be richness in the unspoken and, as Brox suggests, 'the opportunity for a true reckoning with the self, with external obligation, and with power.' ... 'To listen fully,' Brox writes, 'requires silence. To engage in meaningful conversation requires silence.'
Gently meandering ... 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.
