Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence - Hardcover

""Zero Decibels" is the result of George Foy's year-long and personal quest for silence. A passionate and provocative study, it should be on everyone's must-read list."--Anne D. LeClaire, author of "Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence"

"As questing beasts go, silence proves to be as elusive as an aural unicorn in a dense thorny forest of attention-shredding noise. That a writer such as George Michelson Foy should apply his immense brain power and obsessive investigative skills to stalking this intriguing prey is a surprise and a pure delight. The result is a lively, elegantly written examination of nothing no less than our existence, as it pours into, and out of, our humble ears. The art and science of hearing has found its poet laureate."--Bob Shacochis, author of "Easy in the Islands" and "The Immaculate Invasion"

As questing beasts go, silence proves to be as elusive as an aural unicorn in a dense thorny forest of attention-shredding noise. That a writer such as George Michelson Foy should apply his immense brain power and obsessive investigative skills to stalking this intriguing prey is a surprise and a pure delight. The result is a lively, elegantly written examination of nothing no less than our existence, as it pours into, and out of, our humble ears. The art and science of hearing has found its poet laureate. Bob Shacochis, author of "Easy in the Islands" and "The Immaculate Invasion"

"Zero Decibels" is the result of George Foy's year-long and personal quest for silence.A passionate and provocative study, it should be on everyone's must-read list. Anne D. LeClaire, author of "Listening Below the Noise: The Transformative Power of Silence"

"George Foy has written the perfect antidote for our increasingly noisy age. "Zero Decibels" is meditative, witty, lyrical, and fascinating. Every page is a revelation."
--Alan Burdick, author of "Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion"

"A compelling, lyrical exploration of an increasingly rare and elusive place: silence. Foy employs every means that modernity offers both to measure the pervasiveness and power of noise in modern life and to escape it. The results of his journey offer us not just a deeper appreciation of silence but, more surprisingly, of sound."--Charles Siebert, author of "The Wauchula Woods Accord"

George Michelsen Foy is the author of Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human and Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, as well as twelve critically acclaimed novels. He was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in fiction and his articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Harper's, The New York Times, and Men's Journal, among others. A former officer on British coastal freighters, he teaches creative writing at NYU, holds a US Coast Guard coastal captain's license, and divides his time between Cape Cod and New York.