Brent Hightower

Books have always been central to my life, since I was raised among the books and records of my father's library in Placitas, New Mexico, in the 1960s. Placitas, when I was a child, was a sort of Mecca for the counterculture in America. It seems if you ask any old hippie (among whom I suppose I am one) and they'll tell you," Oh yeah, I lived in Placitas back in '72!

The other central element of my childhood, aside from books and living in a counterculture Mecca, was that my grandfather and uncle worked at Sandia Laboratories, essentially helping to produce the atom bomb. The conflict made for peculiar conversations at the dinner table.

My first novel, "The Broken World," describes that experience.

I also had the singular fortune of having been a child with a verbal IQ almost off the charts, who had a spatial learning disorder - what you might call extreme dyslexia. I could always read (literally as long as I can remember) and did voraciously, but I had to work very hard to become writer, which was what I was,

I just was a writer, by nature, even though most people who read my early work strongly disagreed!

Central to my adult life has been a deep love of nature, tempered by the realism derived through an understanding of the Darwinian order. I've always lived in places where nature predominated. Of equal importance has been my dismay at the decline of the United states and the world over my lifetime.

That disillusionment made me into a rebel, and someone who perforce has lived outside the mainstream most of my life. I simply looked at modern society, especially the rise of corporatism, and thought that it was just wrong. That put me, at least until recently, in a minority.

These are some of the things that have influenced my writing; along with a sort of innate mysticism I attribute to the Irish side of my ancertory.

Over the last twenty years my attention has been to the creation of five books - and only to their creation, for the work alone has mattered to me. So until now (late September, 2020) I've been unable to devote much attention to promoting my work.

I hope the reader will take that into consideration before judging these books upon the limited number of reviews that have so far been written.

The four books now listed on Goodreads are at last in their final form, and my new novel, "The Heir Apparent," will soon be listed here as well. These books, taken as a whole, are not mere entertainment. They represent a lifetime's reflection of the state of mankind and the world, and point the way to possible solutions for our current situation.

Brent Hightower

Hilo Hawaii

09/17/2020