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Spinning a tale full of "charismatic dialogue and charming, homespun characterization," Ivan Doig again brings readers on an adventure centered on his protagonist Morris "Morrie" Morgan in Work Song. And in Jane Brox's Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light we get "a superb history of how the availability of ever more artificial light has changed our world over the centuries."

Work Song
Ivan Doig. Riverhead, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59448-762-0 Doig affectionately revisits Morris “Morrie” Morgan from the much-heralded The Whistling Season. Now, 10 years later, in 1919, Morrie lands in Butte, Mont., beholding the area’s natural beauty that “made a person look twice.” Scoring a job is a top priority, as is getting more face time with Grace Faraday, the alluring widow who runs the boardinghouse where he stays. Things, naturally, are complicated, as the fiendishly bookish Morrie is on the run from Chicago gangsters who feel they’ve been duped after he scored a windfall from a fixed sports wager. The local “shysters” at the duplicitous Anaconda Copper Mining Company, meanwhile, find Morrie’s sudden interest in Butte highly suspicious as they try to bully Grace into selling her property. Morrie lands what might be an ideal job working at the public library with ex–cattle rancher Samuel Sandison, though our sturdy narrator must choose sides when the mining company ups the ante. Drama ebbs and flows as Morrie yields to the plight of union leader Jared Evans, and Morrie and Samuel come to terms with sins from their pasts. Charismatic dialogue and charming, homespun characterization make Doig’s latest another surefire winner. (July)

Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
Jane Brox. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 (388p) ISBN 978-0-547-05527-5
A superb history of how the availability of ever more artificial light has changed our world over the centuries, from stone lamps in prehistoric caves to contemporary light-emitting diodes (LEDs). No simpleminded technological determinist, Brox (Here and Nowhere Else) appreciates how culture and technology have affected each other at every stage. She repeatedly reveals how humankind’s increasing ability to extend the hours of light available for work and for leisure has been critical to the evolution of societies almost everywhere. Her readings of, for example, prehistoric southern French caves, medieval and early modern villages, whaling and other ships, industrializing cities, Chicago’s White City of 1893, and wartime and peacetime blackouts are invariably fascinating and often original. In addition, she conveys technical information clearly and concisely. Brox’s concluding portions, about the unexpected negative effects of too much artificial light on observatories in southern California and elsewhere, are provocative and dismaying. With Brox’s beautiful prose, this book amply lives up to its title. (July)

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