Also of interest ... in world-altering appetites

Brilliant

by Jane Brox

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Jane Brox’s sprawling history of “humankind’s relationship with flames, lamps, and bulbs” uncovers the dark side of artificial light, said Max Ross in The Boston Globe. The modern world’s ever-present illumination causes us to sleep less, work longer, ignore nature, and isolate ourselves. Each new invention, she argues, separates “not just light from dark, but rich from poor”: Until the 1930s, only well-off Americans had domestic lighting; even today, richer countries can be distinguished in satellite images because they shine more brightly.

Fur, Fortune, and Empire

by Eric Jay Dolin

(Norton, $30)

The gruesome business of separating pelts from freshly killed animals was “a surprisingly vital component” in early American history, said David Holahan in TheChristianScienceMonitor.com. Europe’s desire for beaver pelts saved Plymouth Colony and made the continent the site of imperial wars. In a work that “reads like a lively textbook,” Eric Jay Dolin tracks the fur trade across three centuries as it nearly wipes out beaver, buffalo, and entire native tribes. He’s “dispassionate throughout,” yet his story begs for passion.

Losing Our Cool

by Stan Cox

(New Press, $25)

Scientist Stan Cox wants to blame air conditioning “for just about everything wrong with America,” said Eric Felten in The Wall Street Journal. Not only does it account for 15 percent of America’s total energy consumption, it has also encouraged Americans to spread into fragile desert environments, and has led to increased social fragmentation and even obesity. But when Cox argues that A/C has contributed greatly to the growth of Republican power, you wonder if his concern for the environment simply “cloaks a cultural and political agenda.”

Extra Lives

by Tom Bissell

(Penguin, $23)

Memoirist Tom Bissell is not sure whether videogames really matter, said Dan Zigmond in the San Francisco Chronicle. But his meditation on the subject certainly does. Bissell has spent inordinate amounts of time playing videogames, and he realizes that—like novels, paintings, or movies—they reveal their greatest virtues only to their most passionate fans. Reading his book “is like taking a private tour at a very exclusive museum.” You don’t need to be familiar with the work on display to find the experience unforgettable.