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Beckerman, Gal. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. Crown. Feb. 2022. 352p. ISBN 9781524759186. $28. HISTORY

Revolutions aren’t always about noisy marches, argues award-winning author Beckerman, an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Ranging from voting-rights petitions in 1830s Britain to early 1990s feminist zines, he highlights many social movements that have launched in small, quiet, interpersonal spaces where ideas can be thoughtfully formulated before being purveyed to the larger world. Today’s world of social media doesn’t work that way, and Beckerman ponders the consequences. Intriguing.

Freeman, Charles. The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. Knopf. Feb. 2022. 816p. ISBN 9780525659365. $40. HISTORY

A scholar of Western European thought, Freeman argued in The Closing of the Western Mind that Constantine’s adoption of Christianity turned relatively broadminded later Rome into an authoritarian society, with heavy, centuries-long consequences for Europe. Here he aims to show how European thought began shaking off its bonds, starting around 500 CE and ranging through the era we now call the Enlightenment. In the grand-old-history style.

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