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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

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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.

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.

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.

I finished reading Hitchens book a couple of weeks ago and this evening I am sad to learn that he finally lost his battle with cancer. The thing that stood out the most for me in reading these essays is the astonishing ability to recall past events and apply them in any current argument. It wouldn't really be possible to do this by pure research; he had to have the facts already to hand, in his mind. Whilst I didn't necessarily agree with all of his positions in this collection of essays, he did make good points and argued them convincingly, even causing me at times to re-evaluate my own opinions on some matters. He would have made a great debater and for all I know perhaps he did get into debates or at the very least active panel discussions with opposing viewpoints. I have seen him in action on Bill Maher's show and that's the main reason I decided to read Arguably. On the basis of these essays I shall read some of his other work because aside from mostly agreeing with his viewpoints I also enjoyed his writing style.

If you want a book that will make you stop and think, yet in a format that allows for bite sized chunks to be nibbled on at your own leisure, you could do worse than give Arguably a look. It's a physically hefty book and probably the ideal one to read on a Kindle.

RIP Christopher, you will be missed.

I felt I needed to leave feedback since there will be so many haters. This is a great collection of essays. As said there are almost 800 pages dealing with all sorts of topics. Very well written, wonderful witty prose.

Just finished over 200 hundred pages so far in this great book of essays by one of the greatest writers of our time. To say Hitchens is great is an understatement he is and will be remembered as one of the few geniuses that have told it like it is. If it is religion, politics, war and debates Hitchens can and will make his opponent weak and unable to refute. If you like a good challenge with great intellectual writng then any of the Hitchens books are for you.

As anyone who follows Christopher Hitchens knows, terminal cancer is hurryingly ushering him towards the end of his human life. Hitchens sombrely acknowledges this, and he has known for a while any one of the essays he has written could be his last. For George Orwell (for whom Hitchens has long admired and wrote a tome about to "get it out of my system"), illness, or rather impending death, was the impetus for briskly finishing his greatest work, Nineteen-Eighty Four. The same cannot be said for Hitchens. Chemotherapy, the injection of poison into your blood stream, creates a fog in the mind, making it difficult to concentrate and recall words (not that you would be aware of this from his recent published work). Such treatment would inhibit a virtuoso finale. Nevertheless, I believe the inscription in his first collection of essays Prepared for the Worst provides the true answer. It explains how a writer should always be true and honest about their thoughts and opinions, and to do this one should always write as though they won't be alive to see it published. Thus it seems that there will be no great flourish because it has been dutifully delivered throughout the breadth of his career.

Arguably is the fourth chronological collection of substantial essays by Hitchens (if one excludes his collection of book reviews titled Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere and his short group of polemics on Iraq called A Long Short War: the postponed liberation of Iraq) and is around 300 pages longer than any previous offering. Mostly comprised of essays from 2003 onwards, it showcases an evolution of sorts for Hitchens. Far less prominent than in his other collections are the biting, excoriating polemics and proportionally more content is devoted to his literary critiques. Whether this is more or less to the reader's fancy is a matter of opinion, my own being that it provides more interesting reading, if a little less entertaining.

American history is a topic in which Hitchens has proven himself keenly interested over an extended period in with his previous books Blood, Class and Empire; Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. In the first grouping of essays and book reviews in Arguably is an enlightening journey through American history and literature with thoughts on secularism, Thomas Jefferson's sex life and America's first foreign war - The Barbary Wars. The latter essay touches on some uncomfortable truths about America's slave trade and the fact that Europeans and Americans were held captive slaves in North Africa - "even the dullest soul could regard the continued triangular Atlantic slave trade between Africa, England and the Americas and perceive the double standard at work."

The second, fifth and sixth groupings of essays in Arguably are entirely devoted to the written word. Hitchens is an avid reader and interpreter of literature and has previously published a collection of essays and reviews in his book Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, in which he revised a Percy Shelley notion to say that "when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens which created the moral space for a true argument." He has also written a book on George Orwell called Why Orwell Matters (Orwell is featured in many of the essays throughout Arguably) and written many introductions into reprints of classic books, some of which are provided here. Many interesting authors and books are critiqued here - Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Rebecca West (in a fitting, lengthy introduction to West's behemoth Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and perhaps amusingly J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, about which he remarks "our heroes are able to `disapparate' - a term that always makes me think of an attempt a English by George W. Bush." At the completion of this long distance traipse, I was left with the feeling that one needs to have very eclectic taste and a broad knowledge or curiosity to appreciate everything here. Skipping an essay or two can easily be forgiven, but perhaps reading his critique of his best friend, Martin Amis, should be a must. Perhaps too harshly, he claims Amis has a "want of wit" for suggesting Hitchens' old socialist opinions were perhaps not cognisant of the atrocities inflicted under Stalinism, although Hitchens correctly labels Koba the Dread as an odd book.

Hitchens' slayer skills do get unveiled from time to time.. On John Updike's Terrorist: "Given some admittedly stiff competition, Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon". On Gore Vidal: "...if it's true even to any degree that we were all changed by September 11, 201, it's probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant." On Pat Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: "History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility [of coexistence with Nazism] was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does."

While not the most interesting piece in Arguably, in an essay about animal rights Hitchens dispenses an imperishable observation about the human condition where the "National Socialists in German enacted thoroughgoing legislation for the protection of animals and affected to regard Jewish ritual slaughter with abhorrence, meanwhile being enthusiastic about the ritual slaughter of Jews. Hindu nationalists are infinitely more tender towards cows than towards Muslims. As a species we can evidently live with a good deal of contradiction in this sphere." Another detour, into the world of the loudly conservative closet homosexuals, where he suggests "Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won't have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly.." I get a laugh about how many times this observation has proven to be true.

A minor word of warning for Hitchens fans: there is some republishing of works that have been had already been republished in some of his other collections. For example, a review of Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 was first published in the Times Literary Supplement before being republished in his previous collection Love, Poverty, and War, and republished again in Arguably. Another, the review of Martin Amis' Koba the Dread was first published in The Atlantic and then republished in Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere and now in Arguably. As an avid reader of Hitchens, I get a little bit annoyed at this, however I presume the articles are chosen in each republishing because they fit within the theme of the collections. Also, between Arguably; Love, Poverty, and War; and Unacknowledged Legislation, there is about 1300 pages of essays, so it is unlikely that a little repetition is of consequence.

It saddens me to know that Hitchens, who is undoubtedly the most principled and most prolific of polemicists since George Orwell, has little time left. If I might eulogise in advance of his death, worse words could be chosen (quite ironically) than the passage of the bible chosen by Hitchens for his father -Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

Here is America's man of letters, wielding his peculiar brand of wisdom, wit, and acerbic humor at its best and at the highest levels available in his adopted homeland: Taking no prisoners, and leaving no trace of blood on the killing floors as he pulls the stiletto from his victims, one-by-one.

Not only does he define "what we are confronting" as a society, but he also sharpens the lens through which we see it. Clarity of thought and clarity of opinion through ruthlessly uncompromising honesty and English is what Hitch trades in. In short, the author digs deep, always coming up with the "goods:" a fresh but often missed interpretation that careens off of, and replaces the commonplace, settling it in a new home on a higher plane of logic and common sense, one that invariably rebuilds the context of historical facts setting them upright again.

A perfect case in point is the first essay on Thomas Jefferson (TJ a person Hitch could not admire more). Yet, he rushes right pass the nonsense about "whether or nor TJ screwed Sally Hemmings or not, to set the record straight with a dose of common sense that so nuanced that it shows that any other conclusions than that TJ was little more than a "dirty old confused, lonely, overly sexed man" would be just plain silly. In one bold stroke he remakes an American legend, stripping him of his fake knighthood and rebuilding him as just another ordinary, but full human being.

This is a veritable feast of Christopher Hitchens' essays.

At first I was inclined to skip about instead of reading the essays serially and straight through from the beginning of the book to end. However, after discovering newfound treasures in reading what I thought would be an obscure (easy to skip) essay on TJ and the "Barbary Wars." I changed my strategy and decided not to skip any of them. For it turns out rather surprisingly that TJ's excursion to Tripoli and this little war, also sharpened the contrasts and the contradictions of the meanings America had to put to itself.

The Barbary Wars were the second time (the U.S. Constitution being the first) that the U.S. would get to look itself in the mirror on the issue of slavery. White Americans had been captured at sea by Arab pirates (the terrorists of that day) and turned into slaves as well as hostages that were ransomed for a bounty in American dollars?

Here, Hitch turns this obscure incident into an object lesson in America's misfired democracy, as he points out unerringly, that again, for the second time, the founders, including TJ, pretended not to see the parallel or the irony between America's stealing of black men from the coast of Africa, and Arabs stealing white men from ships on the sea? At the same time that TJ sent American sailors to war in order to rescue white men from Arab slavery, America was engaged in the wholesale Atlantic slave trade?

Where else but in Hitch's careful reading of American history would we find object lessons in Americanism at every turn of the page -- essays that go to the core of the meaning of America and to its consciousness as well? Enough said. Five stars

I have always enjoyed reading Hitchens' writings (as well as watching his appearances on television). Many of the essays collected in this book I had already read in periodical publications. That in no way diminished the joy of reading them again; those essays with which I was unfamiliar were an additional bonus. A brilliant, thoughtful and wonderfully articulate man (this latter quality being especially appreciated in the age of Palin-speak), Hitchens is almost impossible to categorize. Something of a latter-day H.L. Mencken, minus the gratuitous snideness, Hitchens clearly does not tolerate fools of any kind, which, I believe, largely explains my admiration for the man. Though I've often found myself at odds with some of his views (his unrestrained disdain for JFK and visceral disgust for the Clintons still seems a bit inexplicable, as did his support for Mr. Bush's misbegotten adventure in Iraq) though I am always pleased when we come down on the same side of things. I was first drawn into the world of English essays through the writings of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Much of Hitchens's work, I believe, ranks right up there with them. I must also laud his courage in the face of a life-threatening illness. The highest praise that I can offer is that Hitchens is sui generis.

I have read every one of these essays, especially those on Lincoln, Jefferson, and John Brown, with tremendous profit. Hichens was a luminous writer and public figure, and we are poorer for his passing. I will miss him very much, and will treasure the fact that I own these essays and can return to them frequently when I need to be challenged and made to think. Hitch says, in one of his book reviews published in this collection, that it is refreshing to know that he will be treated as an adult by the writer. His writing always treated us like adults, and presumed an ability to understand language, logic, and history. He also did not pander to those with whom he disagreed by softening his every argument out of a need to avoid giving offense, but made solid and cogent arguments, and invited debate and disagreement. An absolutist with passion is dangerous, and Hitch's work had an aura of danger, as if one were undertaking an adventure when picking up a volume with his name on it. As he himself noted in Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring) (to my mind the ESSENTIAL book by Hitchens) we often hear the saying that argument "throws more heat than light." Nonsense Hitch replies. We who know physics know that heat is the only source of light. A cold sun does not exist.

Requiescat in Pace, Mr. Hitchens.