

Loading... Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens (2011)by Christopher Hitchens
![]() No current Talk conversations about this book. i mean other than the sexist and racist shit it's pretty good writing i guess ( ![]() one of the greatest commentators of our age, even if i only agree with about 75% of his views. it's tragic that his voice may be silenced when he still had decades more to write. i wish that i'd been able to run into him on the streets of palo alto, where he spent a lot of time, and to buy him a cup of coffee and chat -- as did a friend of mine, who told me that hitchens was charming and grateful for the interest in his work. This fat collection of essays allowed me to confirm my General Theory of Christopher Hitchens: Reliably correct on literature; highly unreliable on politics; reliably wrong on religion. But always fun to read. As much as I enjoy him, I’m extremely wary of his fans, who make me very nervous. He’s perhaps the author I’m least likely to read outside of my home, for fear that someone will see the cover and want to talk about it. No thank you. Although I'm a fan of Hitchens, his writing style can be a bit intimidating and I couldn't face the 800-odd pages of this tome. This thing is so big, it's even physically difficult to read - it really should be two volumes. On the plus side, the content is broken up into separate essays, making it easy to flick around reading just bits and pieces, if you wish. A very thick collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens. Most of the essays are book reviews from magazines like Harpers, the Atlantic, Slate, or Vanity Fair. Reading through these is very helpful in a getting a peripheral view of Hitchens' literary diet from his childhood on. The transformation from a young Marxist intellectual into a more seasoned sceptic of politics and religion is fascinating. Probably one of the best critical minds or our age. I look forward to plowing through some of his other collections. Hopefully there won't be too much repeat.
So, having paid my dues to critical candor, I still find Hitchens one of the most stimulating thinkers and entertaining writers we have, even when — perhaps especially when — he provokes. And while he clearly wants to win you over, you always sense that he is playing in part to the jury of history, which is why so much of what he might, in a rare self-deprecating moment, refer to as hackwork stands up so well to anthologizing. Hitchens is, and has been for many years, the mightiest knocker-down in argumentative journalism in the Anglophone world. This vast volume, containing ten years of argufying, is every bit as pugilistic, as unanswerable, as toughly rationalist, as unstoppable, as strenuously lived, as its many predecessors from his hand.
Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)814.54 — Literature English (North America) American essays 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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