The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany Paperback - 2006

"As a cultural reporter Michael Gorra is the sort of writer we most like to read: he's smart, humane, felicitious, well-informed, and yet willing to let his innocence--what he shares with us all--develop into provocative and unconventional intellectual curiosity."--Richard Ford

"The Bells in Their Silence is on one level a deeply thoughtful and seductive meditation on Gorra's year in Germany, and on the uneasy disjunction between Germany's liberal present and its Nazi past. The book is generously illuminated from within by a parallel meditation on the conventions, limitations, and possibilities of the travel narrative. Exemplarily postmodern in its self-awareness, The Bells in Their Silence is an engrossing and original contribution to the literature of travel."--Jonathan Raban, author of Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

"Gorra's book announces itself from the very first sentence as a lyrical hybrid travelogue, mixing the personal and impressionistic with the reflective. The writing is smart, witty, informed, and highly readable. One comes away from the book vowing to be more like Gorra--a more observant, more reflective traveler and a more adventurous reader."--Sven Birkerts, author of An Artificial Wilderness and My Sky Blue Trades

"Gorra has written an unusual book: a mlange of travel book and reflections of travel books, with book reviews, readings of literary works, and autobiographical sketches. The combination proves to be extremely effective, providing a multicolored and multilayered picture of a quickly changing country."--Barbara Hahn, Princeton University

"Perhaps no single travelogue on Germany has captured so well our American, post-World War II generation's tortured relationship to a land and its people we were brought up loving to hate but which we learned to love. Beautifully written against the grain of the traditional travelogue's certainty of judgements and world-weariness, Michael Gorra's travels through Germany reveal the internal and external processes of a 'memory tourist' in a land with too much memory."--James E. Young, author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge, Professor and Chair of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst