Hillel Schwartz

This is a brilliant explication of the social history of noise. Noise of all kinds, from the ambient sounds of the city, to the murmurs from under the sea and from out in the cosmos. Visual noise, static, stochastic processes, whale songs, street criers, the moans and groans of sex, military noise, noise in the lab, noise in prisons, the sounds of animals, and, of course, those things that go bump in the night all make an appearance.

It's dense, obsessive, and filled with arcane details and witty digressions. Hillel Schwartz seems to have read and synthesized everything on the topic, from technical scientific papers to the rantings of cranks. The prose is rather florid -- the author suggests that book be read aloud -- and the richness of the text forms its own kind of noise. Unlike, for example, Foucault's History of Madness, which this book superficially resembles, Schwartz isn't grinding a thesis but rather reveling in his topic, like a jazz musician riffing on a theme. The book is a pure pleasure.… (más)