Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science - Softcover

In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times bestselling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his bravura 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 and mischievously looks back on a lifetime of tireless intellectual adventure and engagement. Exploring the halls of scholarly inquiry and stardom he encountered after the publication of his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, he affectionately lampoons the worlds of academia, publishing, and television and studs the pages with funny stories about the great men and women he's known—including Douglas Adams, Christopher Hitchens, John Maynard Smith, Dame Miriam Rothschild, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Leakey, Carolyn Porco, and Philip Pullman. Dawkins offers here a candid look both at what encouraged him to shift his attention from the laboratory to the intersection of culture, religion, and science and at many of the primary figures in the merger between scientific and literary fields known to some as "The Third Culture."

On the publication of his tenth book, the smash hit The God Delusion, a "resounding trumpet blast for truth" (Matt Ridley), Dawkins was catapulted from mere intellectual stardom into a circle of celebrity thinkers dubbed "The Four Horsemen," which included Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Shedding new light on the book's publication and content, Dawkins makes clear the boundary between literary assault and literary satire. Brief Candle in the Dark allows the reader a closer look at the brilliant succession of influential books that grew naturally out of his busy life, highlighting the ideas that connect them and excavating their origins.

Throughout, 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.

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.