Its title notwithstanding, The Quiet Before crackles with noise: Chartist orators whipping up support for suffrage... Futurist manifesto-shouters...white supremacists chanting ... But Gal Beckerman’s elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated book also features quieter groups whose conversations, he demonstrates, eat away at the underpinnings of established authority ... What gives Beckerman’s book its appealing freshness is his focus on the vehicles of communication themselves ... This is not least because his episodes are humanized by vivid biographical vignettes of the founders, each framed at a critical moment in their outreach to the potentially like-minded ... As brilliant as Beckerman often is on the makers and sustainers of these networks, he is less satisfying on (or perhaps just less interested in) the eventual upshot of their efforts, doubtless because so many of them ended in frustration ... [The] book (white supremacists aside) is full of genuinely moving scenes of prelapsarian innocence, catching the networkers in the bright dawn of their community-making.
Like other works on the 'smart thinking' shelf that swing between cultural history and how-to manual, The Quiet Before scavenges past events and present trends on a pattern-seeking quest ... To his credit, Beckerman puts a much less instrumental spin on his disparate material as he advocates for 'built-in slowness' ... Beckerman...chooses historical examples with an intriguingly eccentric eye. It widens his horizons but scrambles any simple message ... With the internet, The Quiet Before finds a more consistent line ... The Quiet Before can’t offer any fail-safe recipe for slow-cooked innovation. It can help readers to imagine — and join — a better kind of conversation in the kitchen of ideas.
Beckerman’s wide range is impressive and makes The Quiet Before the most original book I’ve read in a long time ... Beckerman’s analysis of the Tahrir events is right as far as it goes, but it is also disappointingly limited. An enormous amount has been written about the so-called Arab Spring by Western observers, Arab journalists, and participants; Beckerman adds little that is new. And though he briefly mentions Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, formed in 2008 to support striking workers, he ignores years of political organizing by farmers, civil servants, students, and neighborhood activists. The Quiet Before is a study of radical movements’ antecedents; here the author gives them short shrift.
The book’s preliminary pages and dust jacket are replete with zealous endorsements from literary VIPs ... Writes Walter Isaacson: 'Beckerman shows that new ideas need to incubate through thoughtful discussions in order to create sustained movements.' That this accurate synopsis is almost a truism would seem to indicate a problem. Who needed to be told that new ideas need thoughtful discussion? ... The book’s first half relates six stories of how painstaking, relentless work produced 'radical' social or political change. Some of these early chapters support their claims better than others ... The lesson Mr. Beckerman draws from [one story], that collaboration moves scientific inquiry forward, is less than astonishing ... [A] chapter considers 'zines' (homemade magazines) created by the fans of all-girl punk bands of the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. High marks for eccentricity, but the idea that these photocopied serials contributed to 'radical change,' rather than simply being evidence of it, strikes me as far-fetched ... I cannot know, but I wonder if the reason for these oddball choices is that the more obvious historical models of 'first act' idea-making turned out badly ... Criticism of social media will mean more to readers on the political left than it does to this reviewer, but Mr. Beckerman’s own analysis upends it. The activist-driven uprisings he describes...are too recent to judge their long-term consequences ... But—and this is where the book becomes unintentionally hilarious—there is one kind of protest movement, according to Mr. Beckerman, that goes from strength to strength in the era of the internet: white supremacy ... This lengthy chapter makes for dreary reading, not least owing to the author’s meandering attempt to make a march consisting of a few hundred nutjobs and doofuses sound like a long-term threat to the American experiment ... The Quiet Before is a confused and confusing book. Part of the confusion, I suspect, arises from the simple fact that the American left no longer has much to resist.
... a quirky, delightful mix of a book that explores the intellectual impulses behind a series of cultural shifts and political revolts occurring across continents and centuries ... Beckerman’s historically expansive case studies and engaging storytelling make The Quiet Before distinct and worthwhile. Of course, the quiet isn’t always so hushed, the before and after life of an idea are not always clearly marked, and the thinking rarely seems leisurely to those engaged in it.
... engaging ... not a treatise or big-picture history. Open-minded and curious, it suggests rather than argues, and never shouts. Those are virtues easy to overlook—like Mr Beckerman’s chosen radicals as they 'incubated' in obscurity.
... wide-ranging, subtly ambitious ... [Beckerman] wears his expertise lightly, relying on brisk narratives interspersed with mostly familiar citations ... These vignettes don’t always yield generalizable principles ... doesn’t aim to provide us with one weird trick that explains all of history. It identifies a few notable discursive communities and brings us inside them, deriving its impact not from categorical takeaways but from the more ambiguous power of narrative ... is at its best when it gives us glimpses into discursive communities without imputing to them more than it is possible to know.
[A] probing intellectual history ... Beckerman unearths fascinating lore about these ideological hothouses, from the Futurists’ love triangles in early 20th-century Italy to the alt-right’s public-messaging strategies. The result is a timely and stimulating take on how the fringe infiltrates the mainstream.
Engaging ... Pulling together carefully documented research, Beckerman...traces the lineage of how human connection is formed through media ... In each chapter, Beckerman dives deep into a particular medium and the methods that did and did not work for the participants of the movements described. With a sharp eye for telling detail, the author uses direct, at times explicit, quotes from primary sources. At times witty, at times cautious, the text is sincere and thoughtful as Beckerman questions what it has meant to form a community in the past and what it means today ... An invigorating text ripe with pertinent information about the methods of connection that can lead to real change.
