What does it mean to be quiet and alone in today's noisy and crowded world?

Gal Beckerman will be here to talk about two new books, Silence and How to Disappear.

How did America institutionalize discrimination in the aftermath of Reconstruction?

Steve Luxenberg will be here to talk about separate, the story of Plessy versus Ferguson

and America's journey from slavery to segregation.

Plus, our critics will discuss the latest in literary criticism.

This is the Book Review podcast for The New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

My colleague Gal Beckerman joins us now to talk about two books he reviews on the cover

this week of the Book Review. Those books are a key co-bushes how to disappear, notes on invisibility

in a time of transparency, and Jane Brock's Silence, a social history of one of the least

understood elements of our lives. Call things for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So when these two books came across your desk and you brought them in and showed them to

me and other editors here, I think your response may have been similar to mine, which was

essentially yes. Of course, like this subject, of course, now what interested you in writing about

these two books? In the review, I describe it as kind of coming upon the Advil bottle in the

medicine cabinet after stumbling around with a headache. I think we're all craving some kind of

pause most days on the sort of assault that we often feel just in terms of, you know,

between the politics and the technology, you know, this kind of turn of the last few years,

I think a lot of us feel kind of overwhelmed by it all. The friends that I talk to when we talk

about this feeling, it feels like something like the shower is like the last bastion. Like the only

place that we have anymore, where we achieve the kind of mind-wondering experience that only happens

...