The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise by Garret Keizer

(PublicAffairs, 385 pages, $27.95)

Garret Keizer is not a guy who can be written off as a noise sissy, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. He loves the Rolling Stones and backyard projects that call for a chain saw. He even begins his “shrewd new book” by acknowledging that the modern world’s excessive noise “hardly counts as a problem at all” when compared with war or famine. Yet Keizer teases out the surprisingly vast cultural ramifications of noise with “crackling observations” on every page. America, he says, may be the land of “letting her rip,” but even Harley riders are of two minds about unwanted sound. Go to a biker camp on the morning following a festival, he writes, “and bang some pots together to test the notion that ‘too loud’ exists only for the straight-laced bourgeoisie.”

One idea ties all Keizer’s observations together: Man-made noises, not natural ones, are usually what drive us nuts, said Deborah Blum in New Scientist. Church bells were once the loudest contraptions ordinary people heard, but industrialization added highways, jets, and neighbors’ TVs—all of them contributing to “a decibel-blasted lifestyle that doctors link to depression and rage.” The history of noise, Keizer says, is in many ways also a “history of fossil fuels.” As our energy-enabled capacity to make loud sounds has grown, so has the sense of entitlement some people have about their right to be noisy.

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Keizer’s complaint wouldn’t mean much if he were speaking only of rude individuals, said Kevin O’Connor in the Rutland, Vt., Herald. His real target is the oblivious contempt that all of us show for the weak and powerless, simply by going about our consumerized lives. Our flights to Los Angeles, for instance, rock nearby neighborhoods we’d never deign to live in, while the magazines skimmed on the way probably began with the elephantine whine of a tree-cutting machine crashing through a softwood forest. Without ever becoming a “killjoy,” Keizer compels us to confront how noise is intimately connected to nearly “every major problem on the planet.”