New Book: Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy

Image: New World Library

We would like to recommend a NEW Book for our Readers:

Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy by John Perlin paperback edition features a new preface by the author and a foreword by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, PhD. The Book:

• Features a new preface by the author, detailing the explosive growth of solar since the publication of the cloth edition of Let It Shine in 2013
• The price of solar modules has dropped by 90 percent since 2010, and installation has grown exponentially
• Solar panels are now the cheapest energy source in history
• Features a new foreword by Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson, a pioneer in developing road maps to transition states and countries to 100 percent clean, renewable energy

What People are saying: 
“The definitive history of solar power.”
— The Financial Times

“John Perlin is the historian of solar energy.
— Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize and The Quest

More about the book:
Even as concern over climate change and dropping prices fuel a massive boom in solar technology, many still think of solar as a twentieth-century wonder. Few realize that the first photovoltaic array appeared on a New York City rooftop in 1884, or that brilliant engineers in France were using solar power in the 1860s to run steam engines, or that in 1901 an ostrich farmer in Southern California used a single solar engine to irrigate three hundred acres of citrus trees. Fewer still know that Leonardo da Vinci planned to make his fortune by building half-mile-long mirrors to heat water, or that the Bronze Age Chinese used hand-size solar- concentrating mirrors to light fires the way we use matches and lighters today. 

Let It Shine is a fully revised and expanded edition of A Golden Thread, John Perlin’s classic history of solar technology, detailing the past forty-plus years of technological developments driving today’s solar renaissance. This unique and compelling compendium of humankind’s solar ideas tells the fascinating story of how our predecessors throughout time, again and again, have applied the sun to better their lives — and how we can too.
You can buy it at your local bookstore and here is one store from San Francisco.
Enjoy!!

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