{"title":"Jane Brox","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the evocative and deeply personal essays of Jane Brox. Her lyrical prose and insightful reflections on landscape, history, and memory offer a rewarding reading experience. Discover her unique perspective.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"brilliant-book-jane-brox-9780547055275","title":"Brilliant","description":"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. 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The class, social and environmental implications of providing light has shaped historical eras: from crude lamps and tallow candles, to gaslight and incandescent light.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49631402262801,"sku":"GOR005384609","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53117153345809,"sku":"GOR006445753","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0285638998.jpg?v=1751356444"},{"product_id":"brilliant-book-jane-brox-9780285640818","title":"Brilliant","description":"Each development of artificial light, from stone lamps to the lightbulb, along with its companion invention, electricity, has transformed human civilisation and shaped the way we live. The implications of providing light has shaped historical eras: crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours and their meagre illumination restricted daily life, oil lamps created the crazed hunting of whales for their oil while gaslight helped to create leisure hours in the evening and allowed the emergence of vibrant street life in cities. Edison's invention of the lightbulb seemed to produce light that required no human effort or cost and yet, as Jane Brox shows, the environmental cost of that system of lighting is still with us. With the spread of light pollution the majority of the Earth's population can no longer see the Milky Way in the night sky, Jane Brox brilliantly explores how the technology behind artificial light has been the catalyst for industrialisation and consumerism yet it has also led to a disconnection from the natural rhythms of the earth. In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod in its reach and scope, Brilliant is a compelling story of how human lives have been changed by light, and timely questions about how the light of the future will continue to shape our lives. Bringing the increasingly important issue of light pollution to the fore, Brilliant is full of the voices of those whose lives were revolutionised by artificial light over the centuries, and with stunning insights into how science has directed human history and will continue to do so in the future.  Tracing   the fascinating history of human light, from stone lamps to the lightbulb,   the story of light is also the story of evolving humanity. The class, social   and environmental implications of providing light has shaped historical eras:   crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours and drove the crazed   hunting of whales for their oil towards environmental disaster. Gaslight   helped to create leisure hours in the evening and allowed the emergence of   vibrant street life in cities while incandescent light changed the ways we   live and sleep. Jane Brox asks the reader to consider the cost of the current   grid system for providing light.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49640326791441,"sku":"GOR013310333","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49854259790097,"sku":"GOR004339599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51726219051281,"sku":"GOR005328980","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52392816574737,"sku":"GOR011631791","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/028564081X.jpg?v=1751165034"},{"product_id":"brilliant-book-jane-brox-9780547520346","title":"Brilliant","description":"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. 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Her precise, eloquent prose, wedded to a sensibility that manages to be at once elegiac and hard-minded, strikes unerringly through sentiment and convention to the heart of the matter . . . The result is a deeply affecting conclusion to her trilogy of books about living the consequences of natural process, human desire and the shifting balance between them.\u003cbr\u003e-Carlo Rotella, \u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . \u003ci\u003eClearing Land\u003c\/i\u003e is a treasure.\u003cbr\u003e-Jules Wagman, \u003ci\u003eMilwaukee Journal Sentinel\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eClearing land is the book's guiding metaphor, one that encompasses both time and space, and serves brilliantly to compare the material world and its flux with our attempts to understand it. . . This  Brox] does with eloquent melancholy.\u003cbr\u003e-Katherine A. 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This fascinating history of ideas also explores the influence the monastic cell had on one of society’s darkest experiments in silence: Eastern State Penitentiary. Conceived of by one of the Founding Fathers and built on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the penitentiary’s early promulgators imagined redemption in imposed isolation, but they badly misapprehended silence’s dangers.   Finally, Brox’s rich exploration of silence’s complex and competing meanings leads us to imagine how we might navigate our own relationship with silence today, for the transformation it has always promised, in our own lives.   *Time","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50136202182929,"sku":"CIN0544702484VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50419449692433,"sku":"CIN0544702484G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50814421106961,"sku":"GOR010065343","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0544702484.jpg?v=1751167268"},{"product_id":"five-thousand-days-like-this-one-book-jane-brox-9780807021064","title":"Five Thousand Days Like This One","description":"Amid the turmoil after her father's death-decisions to be made, the future of the family farm to be settled-Jane Brox, using her acclaimed compassion, honesty, and restraint (\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e), begins a search for her family's story. 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After years of living away, Jane Brox made the decision to return to the family farm of her birth, where her aging father still tended the crops. Brox twines two narratives, personal and historic, as she captures the cadences of farm life and those who sustain it, at a time when the viability of both are waning. Amid the turmoil after her father’s death, Brox begins a search for her family’s story. As Brox explores, she also reflects on the place of the family farm as it evolved from the Pilgrims’ brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the family farm is both marginalized and romanticized.     In the Merrimack Valley brings together for the first time in one volume Brox’s timeless trilogy: Here and Nowhere Else (winner of the L.L. 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