"Brief Candle in the Dark..." 'Bettejo Dux' (Vintage Bettejo)

Bettejo Dux has lived on the cosmic Garden
 Island of Kaua'i for over 40 years.

Bettejo is a regular opinion writer in the Garden Island news

 and is the author of the famed novella, "The Scam." 

 Her latest fiction"Children of extinction"

 is now  released and available on Amazon!
Bettejo has a gift of mingling
 the present, the past, and the future. 

www.bettejodux.com

www.amazon.com

Brief Candle in the Dark

Bettejo with her mentor Richard Dawkins on her left

Cherish books. Be determined never to  live without them. They're difficult to keep in the tropics but try. I have books I've carted around the world for fifty years.  They've seen the world. Many are worn, many are torn, many are frayed--held together with scotch tape, paper clips and duct tape--but all sit on my shelves and are dearest friends. I'm holding a hard bound--once upon a time--Thesaurus, with pages so messed up, so strung out, so dangling,  I wonder through words like a kid lost in a fairy tale  forest.

Words. Twenty-seven letters in the English alphabet strung together into meaning. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. The primary colors writers use to paint pictures with black ink on white  paper.

A recent book that found my desk is a New York bestseller, Sense of Style,  the Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, by Steven Pinker. He claims, rightly, writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and intellectual  fascination.  Delightful. Explosive. I recommend it to all  writers.

His incredible wife's --Rebecca Newberger Goldstein--new book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, is beyond a must read. If  you love to laugh, enjoy wit, brilliance  and entertainment  find this 'literary miracle'. It's sad we don't have a bookstore on Kauai. We're so backwoodsy. Order it from Barnes and Noble or our very own used bookstore  in Hanapepe.

But my most priceless new possession is Richard Dawkins' Brief  Candle in the Dark. It's signed. I carry it with me wherever I go. There's always a park bench, a chair at a table,  some shade beneath a tree. Started reading it on the plane flying home.  Can't put it down. I'm trying to read all three at the same time.

Richard is 'one of the best nonfiction writers alive today', says Steven Pinker and he should know.

Bettejo  & Richard Dawkins share
 a meal and conversation...

What I loved is the earthiness of it. Richard's incredible life, his  mind, his charm.  His story telling ability. Soon you feel you know his family, his wife--the beautiful actress and artist Lala---to whom the book is dedicated and who paints all his ties.  (Queen Elizabeth complained about one of them he wore to lunch.) You fall in love with his daughter, Juliet, who became 'a fourteen- year- old hero'  when her mother died of cancer. All his friends become your friends. All his adventures become your adventures. He writes about people we all love, John Cleese, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan. I think he knows everybody. He sounds a trumpet blast for truth. He cares.

"Richard always writes like he's telling a story, which is why so many of us non-science people understand science better than we used to. But when the story' s his own life, it's doubly compelling." BILL MAHER.

Someone  cautioned me, quoting 1 Corinthian 1:25-18 , “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

....blessed are the dense for they will inherit the earth?

Let us hope not.

Bettejo's new priceless possession is Richard Dawkins' "Brief  Candle in the Dark."

 You can order Richard Dawkin's book directly from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Candle-Dark-Life-Science/dp/0062288431

Bettejo provided the quote on 

the enclosed Kauai sunrise meme!

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