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    Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
    Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
    Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
    Audiobook10 hours

    Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

    Written by Jane Brox

    Narrated by Randye Kaye

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 15, 2019
    ISBN9781684416011
    Author

    Jane Brox

    JANE BROX is the author of Brilliant, Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine.

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    Reviews for Brilliant

    3.5/5

    31 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Given where I work, quite an interesting book. Very American centrict though
    • 4/5
      I found this book interesting and engaging....it also made me want to turn out all of my lights and sit in the dark.
    • 3/5
      Interesting and comprehensive. It dragged in portions, loaded down with information, lumbering along. I learned a lot though. My favorite parts were the ancient times, the TVA electrification and the future of lighting. Some of it was familiar already- the disaster that lighting has caused among migratory birds, nesting turtles and astronomers- but the new information was fascinating.