Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011)

Just as I enjoyed reading William Buckley despite our sometimes marked political differences, I enjoyed reading these old essays of Hitchens from the London Review of Books. He is someone who wrote:

Concerning those who declined to criticize the fatwa against Salman Rushdie because of their purported multiculturalism: It is impossible to be sufficiently irritated by such people.

Of the Mormon church's International Genealogical Index: a classical piece of micro-megalomania where the monstrous scale of the effort dwarfs the essential pettiness of the enterprise.

Of antisemitism: A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject.

Concerning Sir Rhodes Boyson's comment that caning had done him no harm: Why do people invariably make this claim; usually before anyone has asked them?
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Problems with this collection included:
1. the sometimes eventual numbing pattern of Hitchen's writing that recalled Wolcott Gibbs' famous satire of Time magazine, Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

2. pieces about which I knew little – I know who Harold Wilson was, but it was difficult to follow arch comments about the members of his cabinet and their friends and acquaintances.

3. Hitch could, it is said, bang these essays out in a very short time. In some cases, the structure of the essay might have benefited from slightly longer contemplation.… (more)

I have this book duplicated.
A powerful book. Hitchens is merciless in his critique of religion..although he claims connections with Church of England, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish faiths he merely uses these connections as tools to skewer the various faiths. He writes in a slightly annoying way.....a little too flowery ; a little too many historical or literary allusions which are not explained. Kind of talking down to his audience or assuming a breadth of knowledge that many would probably not possess. Just one instance of this that I recall was Lysenko (The Russian head of the Institute of Genetics and in charge of plant breeding in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He rejected mendelian genetics and consequently set Russian science backwards for a generation....those who opposed him were purged). However, Hitchens merely throws in a sideways reference to Lysenko....so insignificant that I can't relocate it or find it in the index. And frequently the Hitchen's prose is a little too flowery to easily follow. He loves hyperbole....for example: "Joshua's blood-soaked tribesmen"; "two extremely unctuous British Muslims". Sometimes this is quite entertaining and humorous ...sometimes a little tedious. He keeps referring to humans as "mammals". True...and I guess it is a way of keeping us grounded that we don't get carried away with the idea that a high priest is really anything other than a mammal who has come to dominate his patch.
A couple of basic themes: religion is man made, faith provides an excuse for horrific treatment of others who don't share the same faith/beliefs....and "religion comes from the period of human history where nobody......had the slightest idea what was going on".
There is a welter of detail here. Thousands of miniature case studies of the way in which religion is inconsistent, has lead to bad outcomes and in Hitchen's terms: "has poisoned everything".
On balance, a powerful and convincing book. Hard to read it and still have the same respect for any of the religions...though maybe the Cathars deserve some respect for their life style and refusal to recant.
I give it five stars despite Hitchen's somewhat difficult style.
His is certainly a strong voice for reason, logic and evidence based practice as opposed to magic, religion and appeals to "faith".… (more)

Hitchens is an entertaining writer. He's at his best when he's insulting people, which makes the chapters on Mormonism and Islam in this book fun reading.

One problem is that, those two examples aside, this book is redundant with Dawkins' superior title on the same subject.

The second problem is one he shares with Dawkins -- his insistance that the evil done by people in the name of religion is the fault of religion, while the good done by the religious would have been done by them even without religion. Thus, even after they've convinced us that religion is intellectually wrong and historically a source of evil, they lack credibility when arguing that religion, in the here and now, does more harm then good.… (more)