Your rapturous review of A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (London: Granta, 2008) sounds a bit like the foreword to some slim volume entitled something like Zen for Dummies (“Out of This World,” November 15, 2008). You reverentially cite the author’s “sudden feeling once, on some mountainside, of being physically connected to everything” as if it is a minor miracle rather than an oft-reported glimpse of the transcendental. Of course, such glimpses have little if anything to do with silence as such. Rather, they have to do with a receptive state of mind characteristic of so-called mystical experiences. Transcendental meditation and related practices eventually lead to inner silence even in a hubbub. If your readers are keen to learn about silence in this sense, they should indeed look for that slim volume entitled something like Zen for Dummies. It is bound to exist, too.