My cousin recommended this and I just can't. ( )

Let me save you a read: light bulbs=bad and Strand is a nut. This should get less than one star, but I'm being especially kind this year, and no stars means no opinion. I have no idea how this got on my "Want to Read" list. I checked NPR, thinking that's where I heard of this, but I couldn't find it. I thought this might have something to do with modern screens and not enough sleep. Yeah...no. Instead, Strand references a Thomas Wehr study from the 90s that showed that humans revert to "primitive" natures when deprived of artificial light and sleep in two periods during a night (note: neither Wehr, nor Strand discussed whether apes had the same sleeping patterns). But Strand goes off into mystical nonsense and blows it through the roof through this thankfully short book.

I'm not sure as to Wehr's credibility, but Strand diminishes it with

Because he was a scientist and not a shaman, such language was probably as close as Wehr could get to saying outright that we have lost our access to the realm of the ancestors—that we can no longer commune with the dead.

Strand's wife speaks to her ancestors at night, and he speaks to Buddhist icons. But it gets better...

Estrogen and testosterone production bumped upward when early humans brought firelight inside of their caves, convincing their bodies that the days were actually growing longer and that it was time to mate. Human females (who were then most fertile in late summer, when food was plentiful) gradually became capable of reproducing at any time of year.

He doesn't realize the comically narrow mindedness of

Before fire, human beings were one species among many - a persistent thread in the evolutionary tapestry that spread here and there through the big picture - but the weren't the point of that picture. There was no sense that Homo sapiens were the endpoint of evolution. There was no sense that, having created them, the world (or God) was effectively done with its creative work.

Done? Amazing...that evolution is done...having resulted in humans. Back to Wehr, and this stunning revelation

When we [researchers T. S. Wiley and Bent Formby] asked Dr. Thomas Wehr, the head of the department studying seasonal and circadian rhythmicity at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] in Washington, whether he felt the public had a right to know that on less than 9.5 hours of sleep at night—i.e., in the dark—they will (a) never be able to stop eating sugar, smoking, and drinking alcohol and (b) most certainly develop one of the following conditions: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, infertility, mental illness, and/or premature aging, he said, “Well, yes, they do have a right to know. They should be told; but it won’t change anything. Nobody will ever turn off the lights."

Loons tend to flock together it seems. For such a short book, there are far too many WTF? moments:

What is electricity but an exercise in human self-importance? It accomplishes nothing else.
{...}
Turn out the lights—and leave them off—and we will experience a consciousness our minds have never known but our bodies still remember.

And just when you think it can't get any crazier...Strand reveals voices woke him and talked to him. More than once. And ...spoiler alert...that darkness is a woman!!

Waste of neurons. Don't bother. I was going to give it a generous two stars but after going back over my notes, I couldn't. It's bad.
( )