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Let me begin my saying that I'm in love with Christopher Hitchens' brain, and have been so since reading 'Hitch-22' and 'God is not great.' So when I was in Bolen Books yesterday evening, perusing the new books that appear on the Man Booker Prize short list and the Giller Prize long list (plenty of tasty reading to come, there, as well), and I was arrested by Mr. Hitchens' stern demeanor. Needless to say, $40 disappeared from my bank account then and there for the work of this logophilic writer....
Reading this book was like having a conversation with an insanely well-read, well-traveled, and well-spoken friend. Some of the essays I'd already read when they were first published, but many were new to me.There were some definite serendipities, such as a run of essays on authors I too like very much (Waugh, Greene, Powell, Wodehouse, Nabokov), and some discussions that made me want to rush out and look again at others (I've only started the Flashman series, and he kept bringing it up). The po...
OK, so if (like me) you start this collection with the notion that there was something iffy about this Hitchens bloke -- I mean how can one dude's stuff be everywhere you look, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Atlantic, all over the damned internet -- and he had that whole British obnoxiousness down to a T, and if you're predisposed to find a reason to dislike him, let me point you to the one demonstrably brain-dead essay of the hundred or so in this collection. It's on page 389, it's called "Why Women...
Hitchens, famously an atheist, famously a leftist accused of being reactionary, famously a man who writes, drank, and smoked nearly non-stop, famously a man now living on borrowed time with an incurable cancer stalking his days, is nobody’s fool, except, like the rest of us, perhaps his own. This elephantine book, some 750 pages, the size of a Collected Essays, is just his most recent output. Some essays were written and first published at the very end of the 90s but the vast majority of essays
IntroductionAll American--Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment--The Private Jefferson--Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates--Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy--John Brown: The Man Who Ended Slavery--Abraham Lincoln: Misery's Child--Mark Twain: American Radical--Upton Sinclair: A Capitalist Primer--JFK: In Sickness and by Stealth--Saul Bellow: The Great Assimilator--Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita--John Updike, Part One: No Way--John Updike, Part Two: Mr. Geniality--Vidal Loco...
A line appearing somewhere near the midpoint of this collection of essays is revealing: “Stay with me. I've been doing the hard thinking for you.” Christopher Hitchens does a lot of hard thinking apparently; keep up if you can. This may suggest that considerable ego is involved, and given the author's reputation you can be sure that it is, but on display too is considerable erudition.The book is composed of six sections roughly dividing the essays on theme. Most important for an understanding o
“The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Selected EssaysIt is hard to not love Hitchens. Or hate him. God I miss him. He was one of those journalists and public intellectuals (yes, that is a tired phrase) that constantly made me feel I needed to up my game a bit. I would read a (no I will NOT use an) Hitchens article in Vanity Fair or Slate or about anywhere and realize that...
Best, best, best book of the year.A review to follow, probably next year!
Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Upton Sinclair, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Hilary Mantel, Charles Dickens, Edmund Burke, Rebecca West, George Orwell, Jessica Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Isabel Allende, Anthony Powell, Stieg Larsson--just to name a few of the authors whose work Hitchens reviews and discusses in this collection (Like Larsson, Hitchens is a feminist. Who would've thunk it? He doesn't say so, but it is all there, between the lines). Boy was this man well-read. As you can probably tell...
Ever the contrarian, the late Hitchens was a member of that rare, dying breed of journalists/public intellectuals that managed to elicit some very strong reactions from all sides of the political spectrum. Especially in the later phases of his career, he regularly sought out - and indeed, relished - battle with whichever group that displeased him, liberals and conservatives alike. Everyone, or so it seemed, was at risk of being subjected to his savage criticisms at some point. Indeed many did, e...
A supersize blimp of prime Hitch. All the pieces in here are charged with an intellectual and polemical heft unlike what pours from most men’s brains. The opening batch ‘All-American’ contains the infamous ‘Vidal Loco’, a scathing and accurate takedown of the former master’s lapse into rambling crank. The literary essays in ‘Eclectic Affinities’ favour the British canon for their focus, however, the superlative takes on Rebecca West and Dickens make up for this clannishness. The finest polemical...
