Bold Brilliant And Bad

From every county in Ireland Bold, Brilliant & Bad draws together the stories of over 120 amazing Irish women. Marian Broderick is back to explore the histories of remarkable Irish Women in history. From creative craftswomen to singing sensations, poets to sporting champions. From Lilian Bland to Maeve Binchy and from Anne O'Brien to Professor Sheila Tinney, these women paved the way for the future and made massive changes in their various fields. Meet the women from history who went against the grain and challenged the expectations of the world. There were and are a force to be reckoned with.

Written in prison in South Africa, Ireland and the United States, Enemy of the Empire was originally a device for keeping sane in a situation of extreme boredom and oppression. A trained aviation engineer, up-to-date with the latest technology, Eamon McGuire worked in countries that were extricating themselves from the bonds of empire such as Kenya and Malaysia. His mission was to keep ahead of the British army in terms of weapons and detection by procuring and designing systems. His activities forced him to go on the run, hiding in remote parts of Africa and eventually ending up in war-torn Mozambique. He was captured by the CIA in South Africa and subsequently spent several years in various prisons where he started to write what became the basis of this book.

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