A stunning portrait of an Appalachian community, the people who call it home, and the enduring human quest for quiet
Deep in the Appalachian Mountains lies the last truly quiet town in America. Green Bank, West Virginia, is a place at once futuristic and old-fashioned: It’s home to the Green Bank Observatory, where astronomers search the depths of the universe using the latest technology, while schoolchildren go without WiFi or iPads. With a ban on all devices emanating radio frequencies that might interfere with the observatory’s telescopes, Quiet Zone residents live a life free from constant digital connectivity. But a community that on the surface seems idyllic is a place of contradictions, where the provincial meets the seemingly supernatural and quiet can serve as a cover for something darker.
EXCERPTS
Excerpted in Slate. September 13, 2021.
Excerpted in The Daily Beast. August 22, 2021.
Excerpted in Engadget. August 14, 2021.
Excerpted in LitHub and CrimeReads. August 4, 2021.
Excerpted in Wired. August 3, 2021.
ADVANCE PRAISE
What a fascinating book! This corner of America is unique for its electromagnetic silence—but once Stephen Kurczy starts looking he finds that it’s unique in other ways too. The Quiet Zone will live on in your memory.
— BILL McKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature and The Age of Missing Information
A vividly written book that captures an unusual place with a story-teller’s touch, perfectly timed to this moment of confronting our complicated relationships to technology.
— ELIZABETH CATTE, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
A quest for our most precious substance—peace and quiet—leaps with exuberant aplomb into the murk of American kookery—electrosensitives, Nazis, unsolved murders—and reveals that simplicity is far more complicated, far more weird and wonderous, than the self-proclaimed #simplelife.
— MARK SUNDEEN, author of The Man Who Quit Money and The Unsettlers
