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Overview
In Brilliant, award-winning author Jane Brox offers a sweeping history of our transformative relationship with light—from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future—and reveals that the surprising, complex story of our illumination is also the story of our modern selves.
Just five hundred years ago almost everyone lived at the mercy of the dark, yet today so much of life as we know it—our long evening hours, our flexible working days, our feelings of safety at night—depends upon cheap, abundant light. Brox not only examines the social and environmental implications of this remarkable transformation, she tells a compelling story imbued with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how the light of the future will shape our lives.
Synopsis
Brilliant, reminiscent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives, offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history--from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future.
Brox plumbs the class implications of light--who had it, who didn't--through 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 world's ecosystems.
Edison's "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 Brox's 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, and--only a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United States--timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Just one of the many pleasures of Jane Brox's sweeping history of human light is its evocation of the wonder and fascination the lowly light bulb roused when it was new, before it became, by virtue of the reverse alchemy of mass production, abundant and déclassé. Brox succeeds brilliantly thanks to writing that rivals her subject in sparkle, glow, and wattage."—Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
“I'll gladly read anything by Jane Brox on any subject, but her poetic and original retelling of the story of manmade light provides a suitably grand occasion for her superb powers of observation and her intimate, precise, startlingly evocative prose to shine.”
—Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time
"In gracious, elegant, unhurried prose, Jane Brox unspools the story of light. Every page contains at least one small marvel, but the greatest wonder is the realization that what she has illuminated is nothing less than a story of ourselves, and of the myriad ways our lives are 'interconnected, contingent, and intricate.' BRILLIANT, indeed."-
—Leah Hager Cohen , athor of Train Go Sorry and House Lights
"Brilliant is fascinating in its subject matter, charming in its storytelling and accessible style, and meticulously researched. This kind of book helps place science in a human context."
—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
Joshua Glenn
Though she celebrates human ingenuity and technical advances in Brilliant, her history of artificial light, Brox also presents damning evidence that in our millennia-long quest for ever more and brighter light, we've despoiled the natural world, abandoned our self-sufficiency and trained ourselves to sleep and dream less while working more…like Edison's incandescent bulb…Brox's history is warm and illuminating.—The Washington Post
Elizabeth Royte
Ruminative and curious, Brox excels at discussing the cultural and psychological changes wrought by more and better light, from the self-reliance of lanterns to our eventual dependence on coal-gas and then electric utilities…Brilliant is an intriguing investigation of a state of being—well lighted—that we take utterly for granted.—The New York Times