So you filled your hands

'The Great Silence'

"I think one of the reasons I felt a little impatient with the findings of emerging adulthood was I was simultaneously reading Juliet Nicolson's wonderful book The Great Silence," Brown confesses. That book — subtitled Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age — is a social history examining England in the years following World War I.

Brown explains that its title refers to the two-minute silence observed since the first Armistice Day, marking the cessation of hostilities on Nov. 11, 1918. "Everything in England stopped at one moment, and the war dead were remembered," she says.

In The Great Silence, Nicolson uses anecdotes, diaries and letters to create portraits of 35 people living in England after the armistice. Her characters range from "under-chauffeurs and below-stairs people" to "royalty, as well as famous writers and artists," Brown says. And in Brown's eyes, Nicolson's bottom-up approach to history is what makes her book so affecting.

"What we don't think about is the devastating trauma of what it was like when one in seven young men in England had died," she says. And certainly the incidents from Nicolson's book that Brown recounts are harrowing.

"She describes scenes like, for instance, riding the bus, and suddenly some woman would just break into wild tears as something had reminded her of her son, or her brother or somebody in her family," the editor says. "Or she would talk about men walking the streets of London wearing these strange, eerie tin masks because their faces had been shot away."

One surgeon, Howard Gillies — himself a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Great War — was so affected by the tin-masked men that he worked to develop a revolutionary plastic surgery technique. Nicolson devotes a chapter of her book to describing his work.

All of Brown's "survival" picks are about displaying character in the face of stress. Howard Schultz, for example, succeeded because of his uncommon audacity and vision. America's 20-somethings may be foundering because most of them "haven't really faced up to the stresses [that] people like Schultz are writing about yet," Brown says.

And the survivors of the conflict once called the War to End All Wars faced the ultimate test: trying to readjust after a horrific, unimaginable trauma. As Brown puts it: "You do have to admire these people who returned under such terrifying circumstances and simply had to pick up and carry on."