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Arguably: Selected Essays, by Christopher Hitchens
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From one of the most admired public intellectuals of our time, and a multi-award winning and #1 bestselling author, comes a collection of his most important and controversial essays on the theme of culture and politics and how the two relate.
- Sales Rank: #3931898 in Books
- Published on: 2011-09-06
- Released on: 2011-09-06
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.28" h x 1.88" w x 6.31" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 816 pages
Review
A New York Times Book Review Best Book
A Globe and Mail Best Book
“Bright, witty… one of the most lucid and humane voices of our age.”
—The Globe and Mail
Praise for Christopher Hitchens:
"Whether he's dodging bullets in Sarajevo, dissing Bill Clinton (with whom he says he shared a girlfriend at Oxford), or explaining his switch from leftist to Iraq war supporter, this foreign correspondent, pundit, and bon vivant makes for an enlightening companion."
— Kyle Smith, People Magazine
"A conversation with Hitchens mimics a trip through Wikipedia. Every thought is hyperlinked, with one subject slaloming into the next in ways baffling and enlightening, confounding and profound."
— Washington Post
"A great polemicist compellingly, effectively, sometimes bullyingly, attacks all gods and religions."
—The Globe and Mail
"Electric and electrifying . . . high-spirited. . . . [Hitchens] has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments with a flick of the wrist. . . . The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens's personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet."
—New York Times
"Few writers can match his cerebral pyrotechnics. Fewer still can emulate his punch as an intellectual character assassin. It is hard not to admire the sheer virtuosity of his prose, yet it is rare to mistake it for wisdom or good judgment. With Hitchens one simply goes along for the ride. The destination hardly matters."
—Financial Times
"[Hitchens] is effortlessly witty and entertaining as well as utterly rational. . . . He offers the open-minded plenty to think about."
—Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Atlantic, authored numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. He was also the author of the international bestsellers god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Hitch-22: A Memoir. He died in December 2011.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Gods of Our Fathers: The United
States of Enlightenment
Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us, either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.
Moreover, the eighteenth-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the Earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime (on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, as it happens), but Jefferson’s guesses about the fossils found in Virginia were to Darwinism what alchemy is to chemistry. And the insights of Einstein and Freud lay over a still more distant horizon. The furthest that most skeptics could go was in the direction of an indeterminate deism, which accepted that the natural order seemed to require a designer but did not necessitate the belief that the said designer actually intervened in human affairs. Invocations such as “nature’s god” were partly intended to hedge this bet, while avoiding giving offense to the pious. Even Thomas Paine, the most explicitly anti-Christian of the lot, wrote The Age of Reason as a defense of god from those who traduced him in man-made screeds like the Bible.
Considering these limitations, it is quite astonishing how irreligious the Founders actually were. You might not easily guess, for example, who was the author of the following words:
Oh! Lord! Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland Pensilvania [sic], New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would. . . . There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.
That was John Adams, in relatively mild form. He was also to point out, though without too much optimism, the secret weapon that secularists had at their disposal—namely the profusion of different religious factions:
The multitude and diversity of them, You will say, is our Security against them all. God grant it. But if We consider that the Presbyterians and Methodists are far the most numerous and the most likely to unite; let a George Whitefield arise, with a military cast, like Mahomet, or Loyola, and what will become of all the other Sects who can never unite?
George Whitefield was the charismatic preacher who is so superbly mocked in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Of Franklin it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger’s excellent recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here), but the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs. In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the basis of the later First Amendment—they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous “wall of separation” letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by—the Congregationalists of Connecticut.
This same divide-and-rule tactic may have won him the election of 1800 that made him president in the first place. In the face of a hysterical Federalist campaign to blacken Jefferson as an infidel, the Voltaire of Monticello appealed directly to those who feared the arrogance of the Presbyterians. Adams himself thought that this had done the trick.
“With the Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and Moravians,” he wrote, “as well as the Dutch and German Lutherans and Calvinists, it had an immense effect, and turned them in such numbers as decided the election. They said, let us have an Atheist or Deist or any thing rather than an establishment of Presbyterianism.”
The essential point—that a religiously neutral state is the chief guarantee of religious pluralism—is the one that some of today’s would-be theocrats are determined to miss. Brooke Allen misses no chance to rub it in, sometimes rather heavily stressing contemporary “faith-based” analogies. She is especially interesting on the extent to which the Founders felt obliged to keep their doubts on religion to themselves. Madison, for example, did not find himself able, during the War of 1812, to refuse demands for a national day of prayer and fasting. But he confided his own reservations to his private papers, published as “Detached Memoranda” only in 1946. It was in those pages, too, that he expressed the view that to have chaplains opening Congress, or chaplains in the armed forces, was unconstitutional.
Most helpful customer reviews
381 of 397 people found the following review helpful.
A brilliant intro for new fans, and a fantastic "Best Of" for old ones
By B Waters
I should begin by admitting that I just received this book today; however, as a longtime fan of Hitch's work, I've already read the majority of these essays, so I feel confident in writing this review now.
I pre-ordered this book months ago, but until today I didn't know which of his essays would be included. I'm absolutely thrilled by the final product. To begin with, it's massive - at nearly 800 pages, it's larger than "god Is Not Great" and "Hitch-22" combined. The essays are sorted into 6 sections, and I'll cover each of them in some detail below.
"All American" focuses on the history, policies, and distinguished figures of the United States. It appears to be sorted chronologically; beginning with essays on Jefferson and Franklin, continuing through subjects like John Brown and Lincoln, JFK, John Updike, and Gore Vidal, and then closing with essays on modern issues like capital punishment and atheism in the modern military.
"Eclectic Affinities" includes Hitchens' best essays on notable literary figures. There are about 30 essays here, covering everything from Karl Marx, to Graham Greene, to George Orwell, to JK Rowling.
"Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments" is relatively short, with only 8 essays. However, these are some of Hitch's most famous and controversial personal remarks, including the infamous "Why Women Aren't Funny" and his charming "New Commandments".
"Offshore Accounts" primarily deals with modern political conflicts. It includes his experience with waterboarding, his admiration for Kurdistan, and his encyclopedic knowledge of current politics. This is probably the most notable section of the book, and also one of the longest.
"Legacies of Totalitarianism" takes us back to earlier conflicts, focusing especially on the first half of the last century. The essays here are mostly based on specific people, and the legacies that endured long after they did.
"Words' Worth" covers Hitchens' essays on language and culture. The earlier sections focused on Hitch as a political essayist, but this section closes the book with Hitch as a charming raconteur. More than the other sections, it allows Hitch to be more personal and candid, and that allows his inimitable writing style and witty humor to take center stage.
Over the past several years, Hitchens has been famous primarily for his antitheism. But as powerful and important as that is, I think it tends to downplay just how broad his career has been. I actually consider this book a great companion piece to his memoirs. As you look over the comprehensive nature of the combined essays, you can't help but admire the life Hitchens has led. As he puts it, he "burned the candle at both ends, and it gave a lovely light." This book, almost as much as "Hitch-22", is evidence of that.
My one small disappointment is that the book focuses almost exclusively on essays written relatively recently. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with copyright entanglements, but I would like to have seen more of his older works. His recent essays are all easily available online, and I was hoping for a bit more from past archives. Having said that, I can also see the benefit of relying on the recent works, as they give a very fresh, updated look at the world. In fact, this book has instantly become my "go to" recommendation for people saying they want to be more involved in current events. It's long enough to be comprehensive, but the essay format allows it to be concise as well. And even though most of this material is available free online, it's definitely worth owning this archive of his most notable short works. I love the structure and layout of the essays, and the index is marvelous. It's a wonderful book for any fan of Christopher Hitchens, as well as anyone interested in politics, history, and culture.
119 of 122 people found the following review helpful.
Swan Song
By Robert Taylor Brewer
Christopher Hitchens has been told he hasn't much time to live, so with whatever time he does have left he gives us Arguably, a book of essays, for what may be his final effort. And if by chance you haven't ever read Mr. Hitchens and would like one book to stand as a proxy for his life's work, let it be this. Arguably is a compendium of short brilliant gems, intended for either the lay or the professional reader, that comes together to form a thesis about the variations on human activity put together by a literary descendent of Emerson, H.L. Mencken and Paul Goodman. No human activity on any subject is too small to warrant his attention.
Hitchens has the ability to present the past in such a way as to leave the general reader exclaiming "shouldn't this be the way we handle the present?" For example, in the essay Jefferson Versus The Muslim Pirates, there is not a single mention of 21st century pirates operating out of motherships, and yet every reader will make a connection between the Barbary pirates and our current circumstances. His ability to explain the past happens just outside the mothership of current events and he leaves it to the reader to connect the two.
Other essays reduce to a simplicity that have the reader wondering, in the case of a nation trafficking, Hitchens believes, in human bondage like North Korea, why immediate international pressure of the kind that ended apartheid in South Africa isn't brought to bear to end the regime of Kim Jung-il. On the other hand, if you thought The Big Sleep had a complicated plot, (4 viewings to resolve what Eddie Mars had on Lauren Bacall) you may be dazed and confused by his review of the film The Baader Meinhof Complex, although even that sorts out understandably: Nazi fascism versus Stalinist communism.
There are some essays, like Vietnam Syndrome, where Hitchens abandons all mental and literary gymnastics in favor of the E.M. Forester axiom: only connect. He believes the legacy of environmental poisoning there is so dire a story that he begs for the reader's attention and is willing to make presentations as graphic as they are disturbing to get it. In literary matters, he can lift the veil of contemporary hype, and with a few deft strokes penetrate an entire phenomena (Stieg Larsson) or he can debunk the courtly mannerisms of one of the world's greatest authors (John Updike). Skip the essay on Edward Said. It's overly cerebral; proceed instead to The Swastika And The Cedar which has an action angle that is cinemagraphic. I have Matt Damon playing Hitchens, the journalist who instigates his own beating by Syrian bullies. This is a voice not content to write about events and not above participating in them.
Mark Twain gets representation here, as does Dickens, Graham Greene, Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Jessica Mitford, Martin Amis, Samuel Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but it is the writer's wife who has the best single line in the book ("Women get funnier as they get older") so that what we have here in sum as well as substance, is an author's valentine to the human race.
74 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
Hitchens All in One Place
By Amazon Customer
An excellent compilation/anthology of recent essays published by that incomparable prose stylist Mr.Christopher Hitchens in "The Atlantic Monthly","Slate", "Vanity Fair", & a few other outlets. These short pieces range from political, cultural, moral, or just thought-provoking topics. This is a big, hefty volume, good for hours & hours of reading pleasure -- and I do mean 'pleasure'; Mr. Hitchens' literary emissions are delicious, sensuous. Nearly anybody can 'write well' (if only enough effort is expended); to few does Fate bestow such graceful expression.
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