The Quiet Before

How does true social change occur? In this brilliant book filled with insightful analysis and colourful storytelling, Gal Beckerman shows that new ideas need to incubate through thoughtful discussions in order to create sustained movements. Today's social media hothouses, unfortunately, tend to produce flash mobs that flame out. We need to regain intimate forms of communication if we want to nurture real transformation. Rarely does a book give you a new way of looking at social change. This one does.

<b>Walter Isaacson</b>, author of <i>The Code Breakers</i>

The Quiet Before is that rare book: arresting in its premise, supported by historical examples, and relevant to right now. Beckerman takes a close look at the media that led to the 'changed minds' of past revolutions, then challenges us to approach today's media with new eyes. How can we make it serve our urgent human purposes-among these the rethinking of human equality and the possibility of democracy? I loved it.

<b>Sherry Turkle</b>, author of <i>The Empathy Diaries</i>

The Quiet Before is a remarkable, engrossing account of the subterranean routes by which historical change takes place, from the adoption of universal (male) suffrage to #MeToo, and an examination of the limitations of social media in achieving real social transformation. Gal Beckerman writes with lucidity and grace, folding a formidable amount of research and original reflection into a compulsively readable narrative. This is a riveting and timely book, one that should provoke heated Zoom conversations nationwide.

<b>Daphne Merkin</b>, author of <i>22 Minutes of Unconditional Love</i>

All the myriad events fashioned by humans to create the world's history - be they wars or revolutions, artistic movements or responses to pandemics - have their points of origin in discussions, in discourses, in polemics, in simple statements nailed to church doors, in furtive comments uttered in basement bars, or in realizations made while waiting for traffic lights to change. In this wonderfully original and captivating book, Gal Beckerman reminds us that while natural events are so often announced with an unanticipated bang, human-made happenstances can more commonly trace their beginnings to little more than a cascade of gentle whispers.

<b>Simon Winchester</b>, author of <i>The Professor and the Madman</i>

Both deep and urgent, Beckerman revisits past revolutions from the perspective of the communication tools that enabled them, providing insight into how we can better navigate the promise and peril of the technologies shaping our current moment.

<b>Cal Newport</b>, author of </i>Digital Minimalism</i>

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but how do ideas ever get to the point where their time has come? Ideas have to be conceived, improved, and accepted by people, and we know little about how this happens. The Quiet Before is a fascinating and important exploration of how ideas that change the world incubate and spread.

<b>Steven Pinker</b>, author of <i>Rationality</i>

In this penetrating feat of the intellect,Gal Beckerman explains the long and complicated relationship between the envisioning of new principles and the realization of such principles in the form of social transformation. Deploying a stunningly diverse set of narratives,he builds up evidence that the process is long and slow and nuanced. We tend to vest our admiration for-or dismay about-the work of activists who turn ideas into actions, but in fact, it is those who conceive those ideas and those who gradually disseminate them who may be the greatest heroes. This book should be read by anyone interested in thinking.

Andrew Solomon, author of <i>Far from the Tree</i>

What a beautiful and humane book. The Quiet Before is a tour de force page-turner of an intellectual adventure story,one that hopscotches from medieval Provence to pre-fascist Florence to 21st-century Charlottesville, with stops in Moscow, Cairo and many other exquisitely rendered settings in between. Beckerman is an infectious guide, wearing his learning lightly as he reveals some of the places and personalities that have incubated the 'common world' we now cohabit.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of <i>Self-Portrait in Black and White</i>

We can't imagine a better future because we can't imagine anything much. Creativity will arise not from still greater frenzy, but from reflection on where we are and how we got here. Gal Beckerman shows the way.

<b>Tim Snyder</b>, author of <i>On Tyranny</i>

The moment for this book is now as we navigate this new era of virtual interactions and wonder how we got here and where we're headed.

<b>Susan Orlean</b>, author of <i>On Animals</i>

The Quiet Before is a splendid and singular history-great storytelling, elegant prose, spanning centuries but extremely timely, connecting dots in fresh and illuminating ways, surprising in its twists and turns, inspiring without trying too hard to inspire.

Kurt Andersen, author of <i>Evil Geniuses</i>

Gal Beckerman's engrossing book only masquerades as a study of media and social change. It's really a series of irresistibly readable nonfiction novellas about unwitting revolutionaries who used new communications technologies to remake the world.

Judith Shulevitz, author of <i>The Sabbath World</i>

From intimate conversations grow world-shaking movements, argues this probing intellectual history... Beckerman unearths fascinating lore about these ideological hothouses, from the Futurists' love triangles in early 20th-century Italy to the alt-right's public-messaging strategies. The result is a timely and stimulating take on how the fringe infiltrates the mainstream.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

An engaging treatise on the power of communication in social movements, historically and in our current moment... With a sharp eye for telling detail, the author uses direct, at times explicit, quotes from primary sources. At times witty, at times cautious, the text is sincere and thoughtful as Beckerman questions what it has meant to form a community in the past and what it means today. An invigorating text ripe with pertinent information about the methods of connection that can lead to real change.

Kirkus

Like other works on the "smart thinking" shelf that swing between cultural history and how-to manual, The Quiet Before scavenges past events and present trends on a pattern-seeking quest. Authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Johnson have perfected the formula. To his credit, Beckerman puts a much less instrumental spin on his disparate material as he advocates for "built-in slowness"... The Quiet Before can't offer any fail-safe recipe for slow-cooked innovation. It can help readers to imagine - and join - a better kind of conversation in the kitchen of ideas.

Financial Times

[An] engaging study... The Quiet Before is not a treatise or big-picture history. Open-minded and curious, it suggests rather than argues, and never shouts. Those are virtues easy to overlook.

The Economist

An elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated book... humanized by vivid biographical vignettes... Out of deafened earshot, there is indeed, as Beckerman's title implies, a realm of relative quiet, where millions of connections are daily wired together, and which offer to conversationalists thoughtful rather than thoughtless provocations, solid sources of knowledge rather than fathomless wells of ignorance, and even, every so often, shots of pleasurable illumination.

Simon Schama, New York Times

Wide ranging, subtly ambitious... He wears his expertise lightly... lead[ing] us on a magical history tour.

New Yorker

A paean to historical misfits and the hard work they put into their crusades... full of rare details such as about the unlikely samizdat-smuggling housewife who boiled contraband pages in a broth when the KGB came knocking.

The Times

The Quiet Before is a quirky, delightful mix of a book that explores the intellectual impulses behind a series of cultural shifts and political revolts occurring across continents and centuries. . . Beckerman's historically expansive case studies and engaging storytelling make The Quiet Before distinct and worthwhile.

Washington Post

[The Quiet Before] at first seems like a Big Idea book, threading together obscure parcels of history into a grand theory of today. But what distinguishes Beckerman's latest . . . is that it has heart and purpose.

Salon