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.