Critique of “Let There Be Light”
18 November 2013
Finding the Medium between Happy and Healthy The authors Douglas J. Lisle PH.D. and Alan Goldhamer D.C. wrote the book, The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden force that undermines Health and Happiness, to reveal to people how to live healthy yet happy lives. The authors did an adequate job of revealing to their audience how sleep is an important aspect to our happiness. They are able to do this by connecting Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb to the lack of sleep that people are getting. The authors prove that that the creation of artificial light has changed the way people live out their daily lives. Light now determines what time we go to bed, the amount of sleep we get determines how tired we are, and how tired we are determines what stimulates we take to stay awake and alert. Using light has become accustomed in our everyday lives. As stubborn humans our sleep habits will not change now. The author did a very good job of describing the ways electricity affects us positively and negatively. The thought of electricity has been around since the day that Ben Franklin flew a kite with a key on it during a thunderstorm. Yet the thought of capturing it into a bulb was not even thought of back in those days, it was only just a dream. Thomas Edison was always told not only by his peers but his teachers that he would never succeed in life. “His teacher, Reverend G.B. Engle, considered him to be a dull boy and a poor student” (143). Yet Edison was the first person to make this dream, of capturing electricity, a reality. Using light has become accustomed in our everyday lives. The author did a very good job of describing the ways electricity affects humans. Although we have light during the darkness, does not mean that we should use it. “In ancient times, our ancestors relied on a variety of internal mechanisms to help them to determine what to do to a certain degree” (150). Our ancestors