Jane Brox will be reading from and discussing her new book, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives, which examines the ways in which silence – both chosen and imposed – shapes our minds and our lives. She focuses her inquiry on two institutions that place silence at their center, the monastery and the penitentiary, and she considers the essential and increasingly rare role of silence in contemporary life. The Wall Street Journal notes that this “engaging book offers readers an opportunity to explore a few crucial moments of…history and, in the process, to ponder what silence—or its absence—tells us about the world we are making every day.” Silence is Jane Brox’s fifth book. It has been selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times. She is also the author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, and three books that explore the changing place of agriculture in America. Those books are centered on her family’s farm in the Merrimack Valley. She grew up in Dracut and now lives in Maine.