Wellness entrepreneur and cofounder of Tone It Up Karena Dawn opens shares her experience growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother and her personal mental health journey in her new memoir, The Big Silence: A Daughter's Memoir of Mental Illness and Healing. Hoping to empower others who are dealing with their own mental and emotional problems, Dawn reaches a depth of honesty, truth, power, and emotional gravity that's rarely achieved.

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).

After more than sixty years, the nightmarish sufferings of so many victims of Germany’s Nazi regime have been documented extensively. Rarely, however, does one hear about the experiences of German children during World War II. Coming of age amidst the chaos, brutality, and destruction of war in their homeland, they had no understanding of what was happening around them and often suffered severe trauma and physical abuse. This haunting memoir tells the riveting story of one such German child. Born in Berlin in 1941, Sabina de Werth Neu knew little during her earliest years except the hardships and fear of a war refugee. She and her two sisters and mother were often on the run and sometimes homeless in the bombed-out cities of wartime Germany. At times they lived in near-starvation conditions. And as the Allies stormed through the crumbling German defenses, the mother and children were raped and beaten by marauding Russian soldiers. After the war, like so many Germans, they wrapped themselves in a cloak of deafening silence about their recent national and personal history, determined to forget the past. The result was that Sabina spent much of her time wrestling with shame and bouts of crippling depression. Finally, after decades of silence, she could no longer suppress the memories and began reconstructing her young life by writing down what had previously seemed unspeakable. Illustrated by vintage black-and-white family photographs, the book is filled with poignant scenes: her abused but courageous mother desperately trying to protect her children through the worst, the sickening horror of viewing Holocaust footage on newsreels shortly after the war, the welcome sight of American troops bringing hot meals to local schools, and the glimmer of hope finally offered by the Marshall Plan, which the author feels was crucial to her own survival and that of Germany as a whole. This book not only recalls the experiences of a now-distant war, but also brings to mind the disrupting realities of present-day refugee children. There is perhaps no more damning indictment of war than to read about its effects on children, its helpless victims.

This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.

The Sound of Silence explores how non-verbal communication in film, shown primarily through the acting of Ryan Gosling, provides an expressive space in which passive audience viewing is made more active by removing the expository signifier of dialogue. The German Expressionist era may have been brief, but the shadows cast since its end nonetheless loom large. The silhouetted, cigar-wielding men of film noir and their respectively dark, doom-laden haunts mirror the angst-inducing atmospheres of their forebearers, while also introducing the now-familiar figure of the silent hero. Considering the numerous silent hero actors in film history, there's one that stands out in the 21st century like no other: Ryan Gosling. His later career has seen some of the most iconic silent heroes of the past decade, with films such as Drive, Only God Forgives, Blade Runner 2049 and First Man cementing him as the go-to guy for a monosyllabic, taciturn and moody hero whose actions speak louder than words. This book argues that it is Gosling's expressive capabilities that keep audiences compelled by his performances. With the use of non-verbal silence – combined with its counterbalance, sound – a more active, emotive audience response can be achieved. Looking further into this idea through theorists such as Michel Chion and Susan Sontag, the book demonstrates that the sound of silence is one of the most meaningful cinematic sounds of all.

Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this masterful, heartfelt work of women’s fiction. Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her “a truly gifted writer.” Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past. Nobody in the family talks about Ellen’s grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen’s husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear—the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking—if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children. *writing as Anna Michaels

This book demonstrates that silence is eloquent, powerful, beautiful and even dangerous. It surrounds and permeates our daily lives. Drawing on a wide range of cross-cultural, literary and historical sources, the author explores the uses and abuses of silence. He explains how silence is not associated with solitude alone but has a much broader value within society.The main themes of The Power of Silence are positive and negative uses of silence, and the various ways in which silence has been understood culturally, socially and spiritually. The book's objectives are to equip people with a better appreciation of the value of silence and to enable them to explore its benefits and uses more easily for themselves.