Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal--or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man's quest to find the grail of total quiet.

"I don't know at what point noise became intolerable for me," George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city's noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered.

Foy begins his quest by carrying a...