San Antonio College Library

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...

"Haig Bosmajian traces the history of the freedom not to speak from the Middle Ages and Inquisition to the Salem witchcraft trials and on to the twentieth century and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His history addresses the eighteenth-century Revolutionary War and demands for expressions of loyalty, the Civil War and Reconstruction loyalty oaths, and the expulsion of Jehovah's Witnesses from schools for refusing to salute the flag."--Jacket...

"Silence is often the most powerful form of communication and it is silence that still dominates the homes of Holocaust survivors and their families, even after half a century. Through interviews with children of survivors, this book explores communication in survivor families from the perspective of the postwar generation. Explaining the effects of trauma on communication, this book offers an understanding of the language of silence that often becomes...

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities -- whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide -- is no fairy tale. In this book, the author sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial -- the keeping of "open secrets." The author shows that conspiracies of silence...

In Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts, editors Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe bring together seventeen essays by new and established scholars that demonstrate the value and importance of silence and listening to the study and practice of rhetoric. Building on the editors' groundbreaking research, which respects the power of the spoken word while challenging the marginalized status of silence and listening, this volume makes a strong case...