Christopher Hitchens Essays

There was Christopher, holding court, surrounded by journalists and aspiring intellectuals.

Even though that evening the pending war was on everyone’s minds, Christopher wanted to talk about the Balkans.

Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and th The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking.

Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad.

Bass, Walter Jackson Bate, James Bays, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, Antony Beevor, Daniel Bell, Hilaire Belloc, James C.

I'm assuming this book doesn't have them all since it's titled "Selected Essays..." but I'm wondering if anyone has bought another of his essay books and discovered some overlap of essays featured in multiple books? To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity." To lack of humor one might add the sin of sentimentality.Thus in dealing with quite serious subjects, like the near-collapse of the American economy in 2008, Hitchens compares Hank Paulson's attitude of "prayer and beseechment" to the end of Peter Pan, "where the children are told that, if they don't shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell's gonna fucking die." And the economy very nearly does.He also excoriates "the moist, vapid effusion that greeted the death of Diana Spencer" and the unearned appropriation of grief at the killings at Virginia Tech as "proof of how utterly painless all this vicarious 'pain' really is." And his view of the British royal family can be summed up in "This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII." But he is equally sharp on the failings of JFK.Although Hitchens can be snarky, he makes interesting and often valid points, mostly negative, about the weakness of Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," and his analysis of Rebecca West's is both pointed and balanced.What I'll Miss About Hitchens By Lee Siegel The price paid for celebrity is caricature, and by the end of his rich, accomplished life, Christopher Hitchens had become everyone’s lovable curmudgeon.In the pages of publications that once would have nothing to do with him—The New York Times (they didn’t like his anti-Zionism), The New Yorker (they didn’t like his strong opinions)—he was suddenly extolled for exciting copy as “The Contrarian,” “The Drinker,” The Partygoer.” The relentless comparisons to George Orwell made you wince, not because Hitchens didn’t deserve the extravagant praise—in many ways, he did—but because comparisons tend to diminish. Wodehouse, who adored the Pekingese breed of dog, liked to judge people on whether they were sound on Pekes. It will include many of his columns for Vanity Fair, and will be released by Atlantic Books, which published his bestselling God Is Not Great, Hitch-22 and Arguably.He is particularly severe on religious elements in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and even more in those of Graham Greene (he refers to the girl in as Scobie's "scrawny and tedious mistress"), giving unqualified praise to the unreligious vision of Anthony Powell, whose clotted and stuffy prose he praises for inexplicable and unexplained reasons.But irreligion is not enough to gain his approval: John Updike's "grueling homework" and Somerset Maugham's utter stylessness are severely criticized, with some justice.READ MORE_______Hitchens In Iran By Roya Hakakian I never knew him to take his time, squander words to be merely decorous.He loved or loathed immediately, and he did both as voraciously as he smoked, spoke and drank.