Some really interesting tidbits in here. The transition from the individual to the state for reliance on light is a really fascinating concept.

Great food for thought about how artificial lighting has changed the way we live.

We bookworms are familiar with the old cliche: reading in bed, our partner asleep beside us, lost in a book that we read by bedside lamplight. As children, we huddled beneath blankets with a flashlight and read long past bedtime, hoping mom and dad wouldn't peek in and catch us. Like all minor marvels of technology, constant use and easy exposure have deadened us to what is by all rights a miracle: consistent, ready, omnipresent light, available on demand with a simple flick of a switch. Adjustable. Dimmable. Reusuable. Even in a blackout, we've struck matches and lit candles around which we can read spooky stories to pass the time until ComEd or whoever gets the system back online.

This book will help you to appreciate just how lucky you are to be living in the present day, and just how much work our predecessors put in to have that which we now take for granted. In an interconnected style fitting for its focus, the book links surprisingly diverse topics—from whaling to racial relations at the Chicago World's Fair to calls for energy independence after the American blackouts of the 1960s and 70s to Circadian rhythms and human-generated lights' impact on the diverse species we share the planet with—all these touch on and are touched by the development and proliferation of electricity and artificial light in today's world.

4 stars out of 5. Brox's sweeping, theatrical writing makes this a fun read but sometimes the narrative gets a little muddy and the author assumes a lot from us in terms of foreknowledge. I had to search up images of Lascaux Cave and the many paintings she refers to, had to struggle to envision things like Roman lanterns and European streetlights which she talks about but doesn't fully articulate details of, and similarly had to reread her descriptions of early firestarting methods more than once to fully picture them. But while it's not the most precise scientific explanation of how lights work, it is a thorough success as a cultural history of how lights changed society.

Not a heavy book and only a tiny didactic in one place toward the end.

科普光明的来源，人类费劲了生命对光的追求

Interesting.

This was a interesting look at how we've evolved from tallow candles, beeswax candles, whale oil and kerosene to gas and electric lighting to now having so much light it makes it hard to see the stars. It really is incredible how quickly things changes in such a short time. We take electricity and lighting as a given these days, but we're not that far removed from the days where it wasn't. This history was an easy read that reads more as a novel than a textbook.

I think I would have enjoyed an even longer version of the book --- this is the type of story that cries out for detail. I particularly enjoyed the coverage of the War of the Currents, the medieval and renaissance practices concerning watches and lights, and the discussions of 20th century blackouts, but pretty much all of it was a good read.

Wow. I found this thoroughly engaging, despite the great amount of information conveyed. But even more important, I feel like reading this has shifted my thinking. I've never really thought about light before because, as she points out, it has become something we (and of course I mean we living in prosperous and politically stable countries that actually have the ability to create and maintain widespread electrical grids) take for granted because it's just always there. The impact it has socially, culturally, and environmentally is immense, though, and that had never occurred to me before. I'm so glad I read this because it's forcing me to confront my own privilege, how dependent we are on what is really a volatile and somewhat fragile system, and a lot of the damage it's doing to the world around us.