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In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
by
More than money, power, and even happiness, silence has become the most precious—and dwindling—commodity of our modern world.
Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noi ...more
Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noi ...more
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Hardcover, 342 pages
Published
April 6th 2010
by Doubleday
(first published 2010)
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Start your review of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise

Eh. Not, Eh!, the very friendly goodreader, but, Eh.
I saw this book and got excited. I like silence. I believe that there isn't enough of it. I think that there is a whole lot of useless bullshit being said and noises being made. I generally sit most of the time in my apartment with no background noise, well for example right now there is a garbage truck making a beeeeeepppp beeeeeeppppp noise, and now a plane, and some engine noise off in the distance and noises like that which are almost alwa ...more
I saw this book and got excited. I like silence. I believe that there isn't enough of it. I think that there is a whole lot of useless bullshit being said and noises being made. I generally sit most of the time in my apartment with no background noise, well for example right now there is a garbage truck making a beeeeeepppp beeeeeeppppp noise, and now a plane, and some engine noise off in the distance and noises like that which are almost alwa ...more

I am incredibly sensitive to noise. I have, on more than one occasion, walked out of a grocery store mid-trip, a half-filled cart left in an aisle (never with refrigerated items, of course), because the blaring music and announcements were too much and I Had To Leave Right Away Before I Killed Someone. My expectations for this book, then, were quite high: I wanted a diagnosis and actionable solutions for the Problem Of Noise. It was a little light on these.
In Pursuit of Silence is a style of boo ...more
In Pursuit of Silence is a style of boo ...more

George Prochnik was on the path to becoming an anti-noise crank. It is to his credit that he realized this, and found a way to turn his next book into something more than a noisy anti-noise screed. There is little more tedious than hearing someone shout at everybody to be quiet.
Some of the people Prochnik talks to are the ones you might expect: monks, experts on noise abatement, hearing researchers. However, he also decides to talk to people who make it their business to pump up the volume of no ...more
Some of the people Prochnik talks to are the ones you might expect: monks, experts on noise abatement, hearing researchers. However, he also decides to talk to people who make it their business to pump up the volume of no ...more

I read this book a second time for the Noe Valley Library Book Club. I actually read it last year and nominated it and the other members decided to give it a go. I like that Mr. Prochnik starts out with a simple story and then it continually evolves and changes to be such a difficult and confusing belief system that silence is good. It really is something that I need and yet it is truly not able to achieved.
I really enjoyed the chapter on architecture designed by deaf people and Deaf Space with ...more
I really enjoyed the chapter on architecture designed by deaf people and Deaf Space with ...more

Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
One recent beautiful day, I was curled up with a book outside, enjoying the change in the light and air of fall, with a fat orange cat on my lap. The baby was asleep, work was done, and it was finally a chance to relax. It was bliss. All was quiet. Quiet, until an extremely loud dirt bike, without a muffler, began doing circuits of the road below my house. I went from peaceful and content to plotting murder in mere seconds…just the whine of the engine mad ...more
One recent beautiful day, I was curled up with a book outside, enjoying the change in the light and air of fall, with a fat orange cat on my lap. The baby was asleep, work was done, and it was finally a chance to relax. It was bliss. All was quiet. Quiet, until an extremely loud dirt bike, without a muffler, began doing circuits of the road below my house. I went from peaceful and content to plotting murder in mere seconds…just the whine of the engine mad ...more

One man's quirky adventure into the cultures of noise and silence. As a city dweller, I understand his neediness for the unintrusive, the still, the quiet; as a suburban and rural dweller, I remember craving the frenetic, the indistinguishable mass of sound. Clearly we can't listen without both sound and silence, can't perceive without the dance between presence and absence, but in the city, the balance is tipped to the point of manic.
The book is a survey of interesting ideas about silence, som ...more
The book is a survey of interesting ideas about silence, som ...more

Sep 09, 2020
Gretchen Rubin
added it
Even before I started researching the five senses, I loved reading books about silence. This is a fascinating book about noise pollution of all kinds.

Of course, I read every page of this book with the rumbling hum of an aircraft in my ears.
This book blends sound science, sound anecdotes, and sound philosophy in a consistently interesting mix. The writing is a hair too precious here and there, but what can I say. Some of the stuff genuinely surprised me - for instance, did you know that people eat faster, drink faster, even just chew faster, when eating with fast music in the background compared to slow music? It's not 2% faster either, it's l ...more
This book blends sound science, sound anecdotes, and sound philosophy in a consistently interesting mix. The writing is a hair too precious here and there, but what can I say. Some of the stuff genuinely surprised me - for instance, did you know that people eat faster, drink faster, even just chew faster, when eating with fast music in the background compared to slow music? It's not 2% faster either, it's l ...more

George Prochnik’s exquisite book "In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise" finds the author writing eloquently about his own quest for silence in a world he finds overwhelmingly noisy. That journey leads us with him through visits with Trappist monks in the New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa; students who, "when they wanted quiet," found it by "closing themselves inside their rooms and playing a computer game or turning on the television" (p. 286); an architect's client
...more

Do I need 300 pages to A) understand that loud sounds causes health problems? B) that we need to reduce noise and increase silence in this world? Probably 100 pages would have been enough to capture all info. As with the Sleep book of Arianna, looks like that there is a trend of taking every single Verb from the dictionary and making a book. Clever boys! but keep it to 100 pages max.

Sound, like food, water, oil, is a natural resource. It doesn't grow on trees, fall from skies or sit silently underground waiting to be discovered. But sound - like any natural resource - can starve or spoil a city.
In Pursuit of Silence awakens our consciousness of the noise around us that both invigorates and destroys a setting, as Prochnik delves into the sciences of audio, psychology, geography and even engineering. Like a research paper on crack, this book tells a story that reminds us of t ...more
In Pursuit of Silence awakens our consciousness of the noise around us that both invigorates and destroys a setting, as Prochnik delves into the sciences of audio, psychology, geography and even engineering. Like a research paper on crack, this book tells a story that reminds us of t ...more

I read this book in connection with the exhibitions honoring John Cage, specifically at UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Art Museum, and a chapter at a time, like a meditation about its subtitle, "Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise"...Noise pollution as an environmental catastrophe brought upon human beings by themselves, with myriad examples that the author has researched, including visiting monks who practice Silence. The monks that Georgia O Keefe visited on the "long road"(painting in the Ch
...more

The world is full of noise and the noise has a devastating effect on the mental and physical health of the world's citizens. Therefore, silence is to be treasured. Where have you truly heard absolute silence except perhaps when camping at night in the middle of the forest?
This book is more a collection of anecdotes and date rather than a coherent collection of problems and solutions. Some of the data is interesting - how ambient noise in an Abercrombie and Fitch is meant to drive us into a highe ...more
This book is more a collection of anecdotes and date rather than a coherent collection of problems and solutions. Some of the data is interesting - how ambient noise in an Abercrombie and Fitch is meant to drive us into a highe ...more

While this book has its moments, I found it disappointing overall. The author spends a lot of time talking about noise rather than silence, and advances in the sound-proofing industry are given far too much geography. The book begins and ends strongly, those sections where the author really discusses his pursuit of silence. What gets left out from the promising title, however, is "meaning." The meaning and importance of silence is just not central enough to the narrative to justify the title. Fa
...more

First of all: listening to a book about pursuing silence as an audiobook in my noisy car contradicts the purpose of a book about silence. Apart from that, I don't think the author reached his explicit purpose of finding a "meaning in a world of noise". There were interesting excursions to different areas of noise/sound/silence, and a somewhat surprising chapter about the deaf world, which wasn't made relevant - I find it hard to imagine that a seeing person would write about darkness and lack of
...more

I am often irked by excessive noise, so this book naturally appealed to me. I enjoyed the style, as well as the wide range of topics covered. The chapter on "boom cars" and the competitions was hilarious. The book also dipped into the subject of architectural acoustics, which is interesting to me. I also appreciate the author's conclusions, near the end of the book. The author found that trying to reduce overall noise in an environment is often a losing battle. So, instead of reducing noise, a b
...more

This book is well-written and well organized. I read books about silence, but I'm not sure how many other people do! I think this would be a good introduction to people unfamiliar with the topic. The different parts of the book each have their own charm. Thought provoking.
...more

If you regularly find yourself wishing you could erase the constant noise of traffic, cell phones, music, TVs, car alarms, sirens, construction work, and all those other distracting noises of our modern world, and just find a nice, quiet place to sit and think and decompress, then you’ll find Prochnik’s latest book of interest. The author lives in Brooklyn, so he knows a thing or two about the unwelcome sounds of big city life, and this book chronicles his journey to discover just what all this
...more

Prochnik does an ok job of balancing science, narrative, and journalism. i like, too, the fact that he seamlessly blends the human psyche's desire for calming, life-affirming, deeply meaningful experiences that can be obtained through silence without referring to them in New Agey woo terminology or even overtly calling them "mystical" or "religious." the science behind how silence and noise affect human behavior inside and out is the topic here and it does include valid discussion of what happen
...more

Though rarely mentioned, the world is getting louder. Urban expansion, media explosion, piped in muzak and ubiquitous earbuds are all adding up to a society that has become immersed in noise pollution, and often unwittingly so. George Prochnik, a psychology-based writer (‘Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology’) has studied this in both its rudimentary and more advanced levels and published the results in his latest book, ‘In Pursuit of Silence: L
...more

I've read this book a dozen times. Ok, not this specific book but this book belongs to a genre I sort of call "Harpers & the Atlantic Spawn a Massive Love Child". It's not catchy but I'm still working on it.
Here's what it is: pick a topic that's broad but accessible. Quiet, slow food, disposable stuff, attention span, I dunno, whatever. Find a writer, probably a long-form journalist who's quirked by that topic. You know, the guy wearing huge hearing protectors in the office or the guy who will ...more
Here's what it is: pick a topic that's broad but accessible. Quiet, slow food, disposable stuff, attention span, I dunno, whatever. Find a writer, probably a long-form journalist who's quirked by that topic. You know, the guy wearing huge hearing protectors in the office or the guy who will ...more

A mostly well-researched book, Prochnik's survey of noise and silence in contemporary society includes a vast survey of anecdotes and history without managing to come to any solid conclusions about the subject matter beyond "there should be more silence in New York" -- since he writes mostly from the perspective of a New Yorker looking at other parts of the world as "not-New York," particularly while he talks of spending time with "urban boom car drivers" in Florida who he ultimately (and border
...more

I had really high hopes for this book and made it through the fairly interesting 20-page introduction ready to move on. I didn't get much further before finding myself annoyed at various writing weaknesses that hampered my appreciation.
At first, it was hard for me to pinpoint, but over several pages close together, I found three types of problems that added up to not wanting to finish the book. Ah, well. Here they are:
-On a walk in the dark: "The deep silence was instantly broken by the squitch ...more
At first, it was hard for me to pinpoint, but over several pages close together, I found three types of problems that added up to not wanting to finish the book. Ah, well. Here they are:
-On a walk in the dark: "The deep silence was instantly broken by the squitch ...more

Skimmed only.
Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so lo ...more
Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so lo ...more

Prochnik may not give us deep philosophy but does provide a multifaceted survey of current contemporary noise and silence issues. From the silences of the monastery to boom cars with stereos loud enough to break their own windshields to the ubiquitous earbuds he makes explicit many aspects of silence and noise we likely have not thought through: “the military and the monastery are each … dedicated to the watchful preparation for death—often in silence.” “… the centrality of silence to life in a ...more

Oct 21, 2012
Tim Wood
marked it as to-read
The Origin and Cultural Evolution of Silence
by Maria Popova
‘Sound imposes a narrative on you, and it’s always someone else’s narrative.’
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...
A painter friend of mine once told me that he thought of sound as an usher for the here and now. When he was a small child, Adam suffered an illness that left him profoundly deaf for several months. His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he ...more
by Maria Popova
‘Sound imposes a narrative on you, and it’s always someone else’s narrative.’
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...
A painter friend of mine once told me that he thought of sound as an usher for the here and now. When he was a small child, Adam suffered an illness that left him profoundly deaf for several months. His memories of that time are vivid and not, he insists, at all negative. Indeed, they opened a world in which the images he ...more

I am huge fan of silence, or at least quiet, and noise of various kinds is my main complaint about living in the city, so I was interested in this book from the start. It's an exploration of noise and silence in our culture in general, and also a look into how and why we hear, why too much noise is not good for us even though society is becoming increasingly louder, and those sorts of ideas. I enjoyed reading it, and it was interesting to see the information the author had gathered, though some
...more
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George Prochnik’s essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. He lives in New
...more
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“I'm scared of becoming a noise crank, but I always just loved quiet. I love to have conversations without straining to hear...”
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