My Sense Of Silence

He remembers lying awake at night, every muscle rigidly alert, listening for intruders. He remembers frantically hammering on the door while his mother's oblivious footsteps passed back and forth inside. He remembers acting as a go-between in the marketplace, the doctor's office, the parent-teacher conference, the synagogue, the post office: a liaison between sound and silence.Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with his working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Growing up in a crowded one-bedroom South Bronx tenement, Lennard felt himself "a hearing outsider" caught between two worlds. Davis recounts childhood loneliness and fear, adolescent frustration compounded by embarrassment at his parents' deafness, and intellectual aspirations that ran counter to their compliant stoicism. He vividly describes his father's devotion to race walking and to televised baseball games, a trip to England with his mother on the Queen Elizabeth, and his successful efforts to relocate his family to a better apartment. He also recounts his problematic relationship with his elder brother, whom he both idolized and feared, and his college years at Columbia University, where (to his parents' chagrin) he participated in the historic campus demonstrations of May 1968. In a moving epilogue, Davis tells of his adult involvement with CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) and of coming to terms with a surprising realization. "Though I was hearing," he says, "deafness was in me." Gracefully slipping through memory, regret, longing, and redemption,My Sense of Silenceis an eloquent remembrance of human ties and human failings.

Selected as an "Editors Choice" by the Chicago Tribune Lennard J. Davis grew up as the hearing child of deaf parents. In this candid, affecting, and often funny memoir, he recalls the joys and confusions of this special world, especially his complex and sometimes difficult relationships with his working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Gracefully slipping through memory, regret, longing, and redemption, My Sense of Silence is an eloquent remembrance of human ties and human failings.

A personal and cultural exploration of silence and its value in our lives—“[an] artful book, mixing autobiography, travel writing, meditation, and essay” (Independent, UK). In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country and, to her surprise, falling in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent, and beautifully written book, Maitland describes how she began to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. Maitland also delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression. Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway. “Her book is probably unique in its subject, and timely, because good, healing silence is becoming hard to find, and we may not know we need it” (Guardian, UK).

“Evocative prose and illustrations bring to life…[the] heart-wrenching decisions and considerations that Japanese Americans had to face…[and] their endurance, sacrifices, and resilience, even as their loyalty was questioned without cause.” —Susan H. Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America? Told in a brilliant blend of prose and graphic novel, this unforgettable middle grade story about a Japanese American family during World War II is written and illustrated by Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature winner Matt Faulkner. Manzanar is nothing like home. Yet the relocation center is where Mari and her family have to live, now that the government has decided that Japanese Americans aren’t American enough. Determined to prove them wrong, Mari’s brother Mak has joined the army and is heading off to war. In protest, Mari has stopped talking for the duration of the war. Or at least until Mak comes home safe. Still, Mari has no trouble expressing herself through her drawings. Mak, too, expresses himself in his letters home, first from training camp and later from the front lines of World War II, where he is fighting with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. But while his letters are reassuring, reality is not: Mak is facing danger at every turn, from racism within the army to violence on the battlefield. In turns humorous and heartbreaking, Mari and Mak’s story will stick with readers long after the last page.

The gripping, moving story of a mother and daughter's quest to uncover a dark secret in the Alaskan wilderness, from the New York Times bestselling author of Sister and Afterwards. Thrillingly suspenseful and atmospheric, The Quality of Silence is the story of Yasmin, a beautiful astrophysicist, and her precocious deaf daughter, Ruby, who arrive in a remote part of Alaska to be told that Ruby's father, Matt, has been the victim of a catastrophic accident. Unable to accept his death as truth, Yasmin and Ruby set out into the hostile winter of the Alaskan tundra in search of answers. But as a storm closes in, Yasmin realizes that a very human danger may be keeping pace with them. And with no one else on the road to help, they must keep moving, alone and terrified, through an endless Alaskan night.

"This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival." —The New York Times Book Review A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape from civil war—and the healing power of community. A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all—the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the magazine column she writes under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself. Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn’t long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors’ lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own? Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti American writer and student of Arab literature, delivers here a brilliant and affecting story about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, and with melodic prose, Silence Is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.

A memoir of the author's experience as a profoundly deaf infant who became an expert lipreader, and who never learned sign language or met another deaf person until her mid-thirties. It follows her story as she made it through college, to become a corporate litigator.

A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star. A profoundly moving and deeply personal memoir by the co-host of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered. While exploring the hidden conversation on race unfolding throughout America in the wake of President Obama’s election, Michele Norris discovered that there were painful secrets within her own family that had been willfully withheld. These revelations—from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer to her maternal grandmother’s job as an itinerant Aunt Jemima in the Midwest—inspired a bracing journey into her family’s past, from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South. The result is a rich and extraordinary family memoir—filled with stories that elegantly explore the power of silence and secrets—that boldly examines racial legacy and what it means to be an American.

What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge spent fifty days walking solo across Antarctica, becoming the first person to reach the South Pole alone, accompanied only by a radio whose batteries he had removed before setting out. In this book. an astonishing and transformative meditation, Kagge explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us why silence is essential to sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude. (With full-color photographs throughout.)