num_pages: 368
description: Brilliant reminiscent of Lewis Hydes The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egans The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human historyfrom the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future.Brox plumbs the class implications of lightwho had it who didntthrough the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She convincingly portrays the hell-bent pursuit of whale oil as the first time the human desire for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure which changed the ways we live and sleep and the worlds ecosystems.Edisons tiny strip of paper that a breath would blow away produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet as Broxs informative and hair-raising portrait of our current grid system shows the cost is ever with us.Brilliant is infused with human voices startling insights andonly a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United Statestimely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light.
language: English
title: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt