Florida psychic Mira Morales finds her family vacation turning into a terrifying nightmare when she is kidnapped and held hostage in total silence by a twisted psychopath who is preparing to unleash a deadly campaign of vengeance.

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

After an accident robs Stella of her hearing and her dream of going to Broadway, she meets Hayden, a boy who stutters, and comes to learn what it truly means to connect and communicate in a world filled with silence.

A unique celebration of silence—in art, literature, nature, and spirituality—and an exploration of its ability to bring inner peace, widen our perspectives, and inspire the human spirit in spite of the noise of contemporary life. Silence is habitually overlooked—after all, throughout our lives, it has to compete with the cacophony of the outside world and our near-constant interior dialogue that judges, analyzes, compares, and questions. But, if we can get past this barrage, there lies a quiet place that’s well worth discovering. The Lost Art of Silence encourages us to embrace this pursuit and allow the warm light of silence to glow. Invoking the wisdom of many of the greatest writers, thinkers, contemplatives, historians, musicians, and artists, Sarah Anderson reveals the sublime nature of quiet that’s all too often undervalued. Throughout, she shares her own penetrating insights into the potential for silence to transform us. This celebration of silence invites us to widen our perspective and shows its power to inspire the human spirit in spite of the distracting noise of contemporary life.

"Finding silence amidst restlessness is what makes creative life possible-and death comprehensible. But how do we find-more importantly, how do we "understand"-silence while immersed in the chattering of the digital age? Have we forgotten how to listen? Are we less prepared than ever for the ultimate silence that awaits us all? Mark C. Taylor's new book is a philosophy of silence for our nervous, buzzing present, a timely work for a world where noise is a means of distraction, domination, and control. Here Taylor asks the reader to pause long enough to hear what is not said, and to attend to what remains unsayable. But in his account, our way to "hearing" silence is to "see" it: Taylor explores variations of silence by considering the work of leading modem and postmodern visual artists, from Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt to James Turrell and Anish Kapoor. Drawing also on the insights of philosophers, theologians, writers, and composers, he weaves a rich narrative modeled on the Stations of the Cross. "We come from and return to silence; in between, silence is the gap, hesitation, interval that allows thoughts to form and words to emerge," he writes. His chapter titles suggest our positions toward silence--or rather, our pre-positions: Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Around. Between. Toward. With. In. Recasting Hegel's phenomenology of spirit and Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, Taylor translates the traditional "Via Dolorosa" into a Nietzschean "Via Jubilosa" that affirms silence in the midst of noise, light in the midst of darkness"--

In ancient Greece, the spoken word connoted power, whether in the free speech accorded to citizens or in the voice of the poet, whose song was thought to know no earthly bounds. But how did silence fit into the mental framework of a society that valued speech so highly? Here Silvia Montiglio provides the first comprehensive investigation into silence as a distinctive and meaningful phenomenon in archaic and classical Greece. Arguing that the notion of silence is not a universal given but is rather situated in a complex network of associations and values, Montiglio seeks to establish general principles for understanding silence through analyses of cultural practices, including religion, literature, and law. Unlike the silence of a Christian before an ineffable God, which signifies the uselessness of words, silence in Greek religion paradoxically expresses the power of logos--for example, during prayer and sacrifice, it serves as a shield against words that could offend the gods. Montiglio goes on to explore silence in the world of the epic hero, where words are equated with action and their absence signals paralysis or tension in power relationships. Her other examples include oratory, a practice in which citizens must balance their words with silence in very complex ways in order to show that they do not abuse their right to speak. Inquiries into lyric poetry, drama, medical writings, and historiography round out this unprecedented study, revealing silence as a force in its own right.

This book provides a theoretical account of a variety of different communicative aspects of silence and explores new ways of studying socially-motivated language. A research overview shows the influence of related work in the fields of media studies, politics, gender studies, aesthetics and literature. The author argues that in theoretically pragmatic terms, silence can be accounted for by the same principles as those of speech. A later, more applied section of the book explores the power of silencing in politics. A concluding chapter shows the importance of silence beyond linguistics and politics in terms of artistic expression. The approach is intentionally eclectic in order to explore the concept of silence as a rich and