Brief Candle in the Dark LP: My Life in Science, by Richard Dawkins
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Brief Candle in the Dark LP: My Life in Science, by Richard Dawkins
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In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times bestselling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his intellectual life spent kick-starting new conversations about science, culture, and religion and writing yet another of the most audacious and widely read books of the twentieth century—The God Delusion.
Called “one of the best nonfiction writers alive today” (Stephen Pinker) and a “prize-fighter” (Nature), Richard Dawkins cheerfully, mischievously, looks back on a lifetime of tireless intellectual adventure and engagement. Exploring the halls of intellectual inquiry and stardom he encountered after the publication of his seminal work, The Selfish Gene; affectionately lampooning the world of academia, publishing, and television; and studding the pages with funny stories about the great men and women he’s known, Dawkins offers a candid look at the events and ideas that encouraged him to shift his attention to the intersection of culture, religion, and science. He also invites the reader to look more closely at the brilliant succession of ten influential books that grew naturally out of his busy life, highlighting the ideas that connect them and excavating their origins.
On the publication of his tenth book, the smash hit, The God Delusion, a “resounding trumpet blast for truth” (Matt Ridley), Richard Dawkins was catapulted from mere intellectual stardom into a circle of celebrity thinkers dubbed, “The New Atheists”—including Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.
Throughout A Brief Candle in the Dark, Dawkins shares with us his infectious sense of wonder at the natural world, his enjoyment of the absurdities of human interaction, and his bracing awareness of life’s brevity: all of which have made a deep imprint on our culture.
Brief Candle in the Dark LP: My Life in Science, by Richard Dawkins - Amazon Sales Rank: #1244300 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Released on: 2015-10-13
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.36" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 656 pages
Brief Candle in the Dark LP: My Life in Science, by Richard Dawkins Review “If anyone in modern science deserves to regard his or her own contribution with pride, even with triumph, it is Richard Dawkins… Vastly illuminating.” (New York Times Book Review)“. . . a jam-packed memoir by a brilliant, complex, and contradictory man. . . . What makes Candle a page-turner is Dawkins’ engaging, conversational style and hilarious anecdotes.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)“...fascinating, thoroughly readable, and joyful. . . . Dawkins offers great insight into the nature of science and introduces readers to many of the major players responsible for creating the field of evolutionary biology.” (Publishers Weekly)“Displays all the intelligence, insight, clear-thinking, literary quality, and at time provocative observations we have come to expect from Dawkins.” (Skeptical Inquirer)“Readers of Brief Candle are in for many treats: lively prose from one of our greatest living writers; stimulating ideas on the nature of life and the human condition; and the opportunity to eavesdrop on the workings of an extraordinary mind, intellectually fierce yet personally generous.” (Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct and The Better Angels of Our Nature)“Filled with delight. . . . He gives full credit to collaborators, shares of his loves as well as his sorrows, and adds a wealth of interesting details about the inspiration for his books and his popular writing’s relationship to his purely scientific work. ” (Oregonian)“This is the Richard Dawkins I have come to know and respect as a friend, colleague, and fellow traveler. For those who want some insight into the true nature of the man behind The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, this book is sure to please, and perhaps surprise.” (Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist and the author of bestselling books including The Physics of Star Trek, and A Universe from Nothing. He co-starts with Richard Dawkins in the film The Unbelievers.)“Richard always writes like he’s telling you a story, which is why so many of us non-science people understand science better than we used to. But when the story is his own life, it’s doubly compelling.” (Bill Maher)“Brief Candle in the Dark provides so many pleasures: the searing clarity of scientific insights and explanations; the depth of wit and width of erudition; a prose which can soar to poetry while never losing its accuracy; an inspired delight in the beauty of nature’s ways.” (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away)“Brief Candle in the Dark gives future historians [Dawkins’] pathway to greatness that begins with the publication of his monumental The Selfish Gene and climaxes with the book that may do more to elevate atheism to a legitimate position than any that came before, whose impact reverberates still.” (Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist at Scientific American, author of The Moral Arc)“Sometimes funny, sometimes fascinating, and always interesting, Dawkins takes us through his later years, revealing the humanity behind the man like never before. Brief Candle in the Dark reminds us, warmly and eloquently, that the greatest accomplishments are achieved when science is bolstered by good will and kindness.” (David Silverman, President of American Atheists, Inc.)“In Brief Candle in the Dark, Dawkins takes us through a journey of anecdotes and conversations with world-class scientists and thinkers. You don’t have to be a scientist to appreciate how deeply Dawkins loves interpreting science for the rest of us in this remarkable book about his own life.” (Herb Silverman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, founder and president of the Secular Coalition for America, and author of Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt.)
From the Back Cover
In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times bestselling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his intellectual life spent kick-starting new conversations about science, culture, and religion—and writing yet another of the most audacious and widely read books of the twentieth century—The God Delusion.
Called "one of the best nonfiction writers alive today" (Steven Pinker) and a "prize-fighter" (Nature), Richard Dawkins cheerfully, mischievously, looks back on a lifetime of tireless intellectual adventure and engagement. Throughout A Brief Candle in the Dark, Dawkins shares with us his infectious sense of wonder at the natural world, his enjoyment of the absurdities of human interaction, and his bracing awareness of life's brevity: all of which have made a deep imprint on our culture.
About the Author
Richard Dawkins was first catapulted to fame with his iconic work The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of bestselling books. Part one of his autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder, was published in 2013.
Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award (1987), the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society (1990), the International Cosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Shakespeare Prize (2005), the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2006), the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award (2007), the Deschner Prize (2007) and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009). He retired from his position as Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in 2008 and remains a Fellow of New College.
In 2012, scientists studying fish in Sri Lanka created Dawkinsia as a new genus name, in recognition of his contribution to the public understanding of evolutionary science. In the same year, Richard Dawkins appeared in the BBC Four television series Beautiful Minds, revealing how he came to write The Selfish Gene and speaking about some of the events covered in this autobiography.
In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker in Prospect magazine's poll of over 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.
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Most helpful customer reviews
76 of 84 people found the following review helpful. Master of the memorable metaphor (and much else). By Sue Kichenside The second volume of Richard Dawkins' memoirs picks up where the first left off: with the publication of The Selfish Gene which catapulted him to fame. He doesn't tell us anything about the impact this life-changing event must surely have had on him. Indeed, he tells us very little about his private life and personal feelings; this is an account of his work and the colleagues who became friends along the way.I am at a complete loss as to why this book should have received such a mauling from the British press. He is accused of showing off and ungenerosity. This is simply not so, but even if it were, with such an astonishing roster of achievements as Professor Dawkins', false modesty would have been even more unattractive than vanity. In my view, he walks this particular tightrope with grace and skill, and he is also overwhelmingly generous in his praise of others. Whether you are friend or foe of this divisive figure (and I can't imagine there are many who are indifferent), his is a towering intellect and this is a fascinating read.Richard Dawkins' mastery of the memorable phrase is, I believe, what most helps to bring his work into the realm of the approachable. The Selfish Gene, raining DNA, the Darwinian engineer, the Genetic Book of the Dead, the Stretched DC-8, origami embryology, 3-D printer embryology, the Green Beard Effect, for heaven's sake - memes. Where would Richard Dawkins say his inspiration comes from, I wonder...I do have a few carps: I could probably have done with being told less about digger wasps (this and the chapter encapsulating the themes of his books over the years were two quite heavy-going chapters for the lay reader). I didn't particularly like the way he would footnote some esoteric reference or other with the instruction to google it (why not just tell us?). American readers will find references to purely British phenomena like the Archers and Ploughman's Lunches explained and I'm sure will enjoy reading about the arcane dining customs of Cambridge colleges!All in all, I found this to be the most fantastically interesting book. Not brief, perhaps - but very illuminating.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful. What a lot of famous friends he has! By John Duncan This is not one of Richard Dawkins’s best books — for those you need to look for The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale, or, if you want a more demanding book that takes you into more technical detail, The Extended Phenotype. Although it is described as the second part of an autobiography there is no actual narrative or chronology. It is more a collection of snippets describing some of the things he has done since The Selfish Gene brought him into the limelight. I was reminded of the potboilers he was writing around the turn of the century (A Devil’s Chaplain...) when I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that he had nothing much more to say.Some of the snippets are excellent, most notably near the beginning, where Dawkins provides useful background to his account of digger wasps in The Extended Phenotype, and at the end, where there is a large amount of background to his other scientific writing. (One sentence that I liked in that section was his statement that perhaps the most overrated paper in his field, if not in all biology, is the famous “spandrels” paper of Steven J. Gould and Richard Lewontin. I liked it because I agree, of course, but I’m well aware that that opinion is not widely shared.) Nonetheless, even in that section I wondered if it was really useful to include long quotations from his earlier books — books that most of his readers will have read, quotations that they will remember. One such quotation occupies almost an entire page (p. 365), but there are other long ones as well.Like most evolutionary biologists, Dawkins thinks that “Lamarckism” — the inheritance of acquired characteristics — has no role to play. However, two points surprised me in the passage where he discussed this. First he made no mention of the fact that in his later writings Charles Darwin became as much of a “Lamarckian” as Lamarck ever was. The second point is more important, Denis Noble (see The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes) has pointed out that when we consider organs rather than whole bodies inheritance of acquired characteristics is a reality: liver cells inherit the character acquired by the liver cells that they came from; brain cells inherit the character acquired by the brain cells that they came from; despite the fact that liver and brain cells (and most other cells in a single body) have exactly the same genomes. Dawkins ignores this argument completely, and Noble is not in the index. It is hard to credit the idea that he wasn’t aware of it, given that he and Noble were professors of related subjects in the same university at the same time, but it’s also difficult to suppose that he was unable to answer it.There are other interesting things in the book (Dawkins is incapable of writing a boring book) but there are some parts that could have been omitted without much loss, one of these almost at the beginning. Does anyone other than a member of New College Oxford care much about the duties of the sub-warden of that College? To be one of the greatest popularizers of science of all time, possibly THE greatest, doesn’t mean that every aspect of one’s life is of general interest. Dawkins is a consummate name-dropper: just listing the names of all the famous people he has met, many of them becoming his close friends, would take more space than this review. Being a great science writer also doesn’t make one a great humourist, and his attempts at humour (such as a long pastiche of P. G. Wodehouse) are little more than embarrassing. Things he said in his speech at the dinner for his seventieth birthday no doubt went down well at the dinner itself, when everyone had had plenty to drink, but they are best not preserved for posterity. He also has less self-knowledge than he seems to think, saying that he doesn’t do Schadenfreude when he declines to detail the fall from grace of a preacher that he particularly disliked, though he must surely know that one minute with Google would suffice to satisfy any reader’s curiosity.I have hesitated a lot to decide how many stars the book should have: five would be too many, and fewer than three would be too few. However, the good points outweigh the less good ones, so let’s make it four.EDITED 10 December 2015: On further reflection I've come to feel that the right number of stars is three, as the book satisfies Amazon's criterion "it's OK".
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Not as good as Appetite for Wonder By Jack Baxter While this is definitely not Richard Dawkins best book, it is still an interesting look into the mind of such a prominent public educator.I think Appetite for Wonder was a better memoir than this, with a much more cohesive narrative of Richard's life and how he developed. I think that arranging the book into sections dealing with different themes in his life was a good idea, but it just didn't quite work as well as it could have.I can understand why people get annoyed with professor Dawkins quoting his previous books to such an extent, but as this is talking about his books and the ideas they promote, this really is rather unavoidable.I can also understand why people feel like is is name-dropping, but this complaint I find rather silly, as it is quite clear that the purpose of this is to credit those who had such an influence on him and his work.As it is, this book discusses the details of professor Dawkins' academic life, although the anachronistic organisation lends itself to understanding his career less well than his previous book, but his gratitude to his colleagues and his enthusiasm for science and learning still shine through clearly.
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