Arguably: Essays

A masterful collection. Here is Hitchens as dream dinner party guest, slightly sloshed, louche but animated still, a couple of buttons down on the shirt, perspiring, smiling. His hands move as he makes his point. You have forgotten already about dessert. This Hitchens is still alive and well on the many "Hitch-slapped" compilations put up on YouTube.A large book, to be dipped into when, as Durant said of Nietzsche, you need "a bracing wind across a courtyard after a long and stuffy service in Church". Here is Hitchens on the Kennedy's:"A new volume by Ed Klein, portentously titled "The Kennedy Curse", revealed the brief marriage of John Kennedy Jr. to Carolyn Bessemer to have been a cauldron of low-level misery, infidelity and addiction": JFK: In Sickness and By Stealth, Times Literary Supplement 2003. . It's the "low-level" that twists the knife here.The essay on JFK, a review of JFK: An Unfinished Life ("a title portentous and platitudinous at the same time") by Robert Dallek, is undoubtedly the standout star of Part 1 All American, which slightly bizarrely has Hitchens, an Oxbridge educated English privileged public schoolboy and former champagne socialist, writing on historical American figures such as Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln.Part 2 has Hitchens on more local ground writing on early and later 20th century English literary figures such as PG Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Philip Larkin and Evelyn Waugh. Amusingly it's titled "Eclectic", presumably because the editor decided that the American reader might have little idea or care who those people were. The final review here is actually of the final Harry Potter book, where Hitchens, whilst generally kind and acknowledging that these books get young people to read, still skewers Rowling:"The repeated tactic of deus ex machina has a deplorable effect on both plot and dialogue".Part 3 contains perhaps the most controversial (bizarrely) of all the writings "Why women aren't funny", written for an unimaginative, publicity seeking editor of Vanity Fair. Still managing to quote an interesting Kipling poem this disappointing rushed hack piece feels authored by a less talented Hitchens ghostwriter from GQ magazine. Definitely not disappointing in this section is Hitchens on Prince Charles:"A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own".Charles, Prince of Piffle. Slate, June 14, 2010.Part 4 is Offshore Accounts. Disraeli said in Tancred "the East is a career" and Hitchens partly took this to heart, writing extensively on politics, Islamism and Orientalism in the Middle East. It is on religion that Hitchens has shown much of his intellectual rigor and bravery. The reader may find in his review of Orientalism and It's Discontents by Robert Irwin in The Atlantic, March 2007 a description of a certain key religious figure as "a sex-craved brigand whose preachments were either plagiarized or falsified".This reader does not quite share the same fascination with this area of the world but one of the best essays in the book is here, a review of Edward Said's Orientalism, from the Atlantic, September 2003 - a book that was de rigor to be on your bookshelf when I was an MSc student in the late 1990s. Hitchens is quite fair to Said, although still slices him open with his accusation of membership of the "post-Foucault academy".Part 5, Legacies of Totalitarianism, ups the intellectual and moral ante. It is worth remembering that Hitchens was once a committed socialist, as documented in his entertaining memoir Hitch 22. Heavy reviews here include Churchill, Hitler and Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan - a book I have reviewed on Amazon - Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, and Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness (Klemperer was a Jew married to an Aryan who survived the war. This is sobering stuff and a reminder of the madness that could be inflicted on the world again by extremism and total war. Hitchens' quote from Sebald on the aftermath of the fire bombings of Dresden by the 'good guys' says it all:"In the altmarket in Dresden, where 6,865 corpses were burned on pyres in February 1945 by an SS detachment which had gained its experience in Treblinka". On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald.

First of all, a word quibble of mine. The title of this book consists if one word: "arguably." And this is a word that should be shunned by every careful writer. Nothing weakens a sentence more than this meaningless qualifier. The word has become so overused that it takes on the meaning of "rather," as in “It’s a rather nice day, isn’t it?” (It’s arguably a nice day. Of course, it’s arguable. Almost everything is arguable.) It has become as meaningless as the word "actually," as in “Actually, it’s a beautiful day!” Probably, Hitchens is using arguably in its original sense, as in “It can be argued.” End of this quibble.This is a collection of essays that have been previously published in print or online magazines like Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, and Times Literary Supplement. They are grouped into the following sections: All American; Eclectic Affinities; Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments; Offshore Accounts; Legacies of Totalitarianism; and Words’ Worth. Some of these groupings are no more intelligible than a section titled Grab Bag. This is not to say that the contents of these sections are without value. Far from it. Just that Hitchens had a hard time coming up with ways of grouping this diverse range of essays.Hitchens was an erudite man and an entertaining writer...most of the time. I don’t know if he was much of a speaker, because he writes like a writer, not a speaker. He writes with the certainty that his words will be seen in print, not heard by ears. You can tell this by his use of words like "former" and "latter," in referring to ideas or persons mentioned a sentence of two ago. These words always signal to me a print-oriented person, because the writer assumes that the reader will have the previous sentences available to glance back at. A listener cannot easily do this without taking his attention from the speaker’s next words. Why do writers take this awful shortcut? Another annoying Hitchens trait is the long parenthetical interruption. This is especially fatal when it appears in the middle of a sentence, separating a subject from its verb, or when it is very long, in some cases a paragraph long! When you finally get to the closing parenthesis and find the main predicate of the sentence, you have to go back and track down its subject. I don’t mind the between-sentence parentheticals so much, unless they are very long. If they are that important, then get rid of the parentheses!I enjoyed reading some of Hitchens’ more passionate essays, such as “She’s No Fundamentalist” (originally published in Slate, March 5, 2007). Here he defends the author Hirsi Ali from charges that she is an Islamophobe. Hirsi Ali grew up in Islam and later moved to the Netherlands and rejected the religion of her childhood. Her books detail some of the harsh realities of fundamentalist forms of Islam and have come under criticism by some. Hitchens offers a vigorous defense of the author.Many of the later essays in Arguably were written for online publication only. They are less tightly crafted than those that appear in the first half of the book. Most of those earlier essays are book reviews. (I skipped some of these that were about people I have not heard of. Maybe that’s my loss!) The book reviews are where Hitchens’ erudition is on full display. He brings a lifetime of learning to each of these reviews, and he really makes you want to read these books. He must have insisted on reviewing only books he really liked.This book is handy to have by one’s bedside to reach for when one cannot get to sleep. That sounds like a slam, but I don’t mean it that way. I would not have a book I dislike by my bedside. What I mean is that you can pick any essay in the book and start reading. You can skip around as much as you like. There is no need to read the essays in any particular sequence. If you find one not to your liking, skip it and go on to another essay. Each of these essays can be read easily in one sitting...even while sitting up in bed.

This collection of late Hitchens' writing is divided by subjects (literature, politics, miscellaneous, etc). If you are a fan, like me, this book is indispensable. Even when you don't agree with the ideas of Hitch, you're forced to admire the strength of his arguments - a man that advices you to "seek out argument and disputation for their own sake". Wether talking about Wodehouse's books or writing about the fascism in North Korea, Christopher Hitchens masters the rhetoric and, mainly, exposes his ideas with an envious transparency that makes you want to transcript his text word-by-word just to learn how to do it. I use to underline my favorite excerpts of a book. This one, I must say, is thoroughly underlined.

Hitchens is hugely well-informed, tremendously eloquent, and argues devastating well. He is liberal (without a trace of wishy-washyness), and radical (without seeming extremist). Reading him feels authentic - considering his massive breadth of reading, he writes a good deal from experience.In one particularly characteristic essay, he condemns the jihadist atrocities in postwar Iraq - urging us to recognise fundamentalist terrorism clearly for what it is, and not to interpret it as a somehow understandable response to the decision to oust Saddam. (His support of that decision is well known, and is reiterated here. Also, he asks, why is supposedly so difficult to believe that Saddam's WMD were hidden/sold/otherwise transferred ?)Elsewhere in the volume he targets other established anti-liberal forces : The Ten Commandments (one-by-one); the wearing of burkas; capital punishment of psychiatrically disturbed children in the US. Reciprocally, one moving piece captures the hope felt in Afghanistan after the Taliban's 2004 defeat.Also victim to the laser of his `arguing' falls anti-science quasi-spiritual mumbo-jumbo, in this case its unfortunate proponent being Prince Charles.There are lighter, entertaining pieces too: slightly mischievous reflections on gender differences in sense of humour; and on the inexorably global adoption of the English vernacular f*** off.I feel that he can occasionally overstrain an argument, and that he is sometimes over-critical, but I can forgive him both tendencies, in view of this wealth of frequently perceptive, often courageous, and sometimes quite brilliant observational writing.

The author is so well read, with so many connections to the authors that he himself reviews, that I confess I feel inadequate to the task of reviewing this work. Whether or not one agrees with the analysis, or the political perspective on offer, the author marshalls his arguments masterfully, embellishing them with personal witness furnished by his journalist experience. Simply awesome.

Much missed Christopher Hitchens - I cannot tire of this book, such a wealthy collection of essays, beautifully written, argued and opens the mind to objective thought and questions the general opinion. Highly intellectual, every word melts in the brain.

It was a couple of days before the death of Kim Jong-il that the world's greatest public intellectual, a man of wit and eloquence, Christopher Hitchens, expelled his last breath. If you don't know Christopher Hitchens's thoughts well enough already to make an educated guess of what he would have said of the late tyrant, this collection is not for you. You should probably read 'God Is Not Great' and watch his many interviews and debates that can be found on YouTube.For the Hitchens aficionado, this collection being huge is well worth for the money. The collection covers the gamut of Hitchens's interests: war, politics, literature, women, etc. Hitchens was one of the few public figures (I shall not besmirch him with the cheap label 'celebrity') who could make a genuinely intellectual member of the public feel like an ignoramus. This hefty book does not disappoint in that, or any other, regard.Amazon delivered on time and without fault.