Jane Brox

Offers a history of silence as a powerful shaper of the human mind, specifically in Eastern State Penitentiary and the monastic world of Medieval Europe.

A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

Silence

In her first book, which won the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Jane Brox writes of going back to the farm where she grew up, to help her aging father and the troubled brother who works the land with him. She memorably captures the cadences of farm life and the people who sustain it, at a time when both are waning.

Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family

Here and Nowhere Else

This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light. Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need 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 bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light

The Evolution of Artificial Light

Brilliant

"A moving, graceful elegy for the American farm." --Larry Zuckerman, author of The Potato "Nonfiction literature of a high and lasting order . . . Clearing Land, [Brox's] third book, parlays the resonantly detailed specifics of life on her immigrant family's farm in Massachusetts into a larger consideration of the meaning of cleared land and its relationship to other iconic locations in the American landscape: wilderness, prairie, mountain, city. 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." -Carlo Rotella, Chicago Tribune "Sings with the joy of life . . . Brox knows farming, but she knows writing even better . . . Clearing Land is a treasure." -Jules Wagman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Clearing 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." -Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

Legacies of the American Farm

Clearing Land

Presents the history of the author's family who were farmers in New England's Merrimack Valley

An American Family History

Five Thousand Days Like this One

Five Thousand Days Like This One

Carlen Arnett

Martha Rhodes

Dzvinia Orlowsky

The Four Way Reader

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.

Jane Brox

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