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Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence
an impossible goal--or the one thing that can save us? A lively
tale of one man's quest to find the grail of total quiet.
"I don't know at what point noise became intolerable for me,"
George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway
platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face
contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed
he is by the city's noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if
such an absence of sound can be discovered.
Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to
measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most--the subway,
the local cafe, different rooms of his apartment--as well as the
places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian
catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer's "silent vault," the snowy expanses of
the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels
more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along
the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones,
floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a
Minnesota laboratory's anechoic chamber that the "Guinness Book of
World Records "calls "the quietest place on earth," and where no
one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its
pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable.
Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy,
religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with
experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy
finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence? Did
human beings ever experience silence in their early history? What
is the relationship between noise and space? What are the
implications of silence and our need for it--physically, mentally,
emotionally, politically? Does absolute silence actually exist? If
so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does
it mean to us?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million
Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today's
digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the
same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally
related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places.
In this respect, Foy's quest for silence represents more than a
simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings
help to answer the question "How can we live saner, healthier lives
today?"
Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, "Zero Decibels
"will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape
of our lives.
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