February 2010 Good Housekeeping selection.
On My Bookshelf by Tamsin Greig...
My husband gave me this book recently and I tried not to take it as a hint. Part investigation, part autobiography, it explores the writer’s journey into the study and experience of silence, particularly coming from an often argumentative family. She looks at those extraordinary individuals who have historically sought out silence – solo circumnavigators, polar explorers, religious hermits – and traces their reasons for exploring the frontier we seem least able to encounter because of modern noise influences. The book is a wonderful challenge to make space for silence in our daily lives and to allow the still, small voice of calm to penetrate our deepest consciousness and be properly heard.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Recommendations: |
After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and the Isle of Skye. She interweaves these experiences with the history of silence through fairy-tale and myth, Western and Eastern religious traditions, the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis, up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated Scottish moor, and the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home.
A Book of Silence features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, eBooks of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
A Book of Silence is available in Paperback
A Book of Silence was written by Sara Maitland and published by Granta Books
A Book of Silence has 311 pages
£9.89
