From Booklist
Agree or disagree with polemicist Hitchens, there is no denying the clarity of his thinking, the depth of his reading, the thoroughness of his inquiries, the independence of his opinions, and the brio of his superbly fashioned prose. An expat Brit who has written for the
Nation and
Vanity Fair and authored a number of stinging books, Hitchens cannot abide fuzzy logic, cant, hypocrisy, or lies and has enraged the Right and the Left with his vehement criticism of religion and his thrashing of Michael Moore and Bill Clinton. Hitchens writes astutely about post-9/11 patriotism and war and about why history is no longer taught in American schools. But this daring political analyst is also passionate about literature and offers discerning interpretations of Proust, Huxley, and Bellow. And he even shares glimpses of his less toxic self, reading Kipling to Borges in Buenos Aires, and driving across southern Illinois in a red Corvette looking for sites commemorating Abraham Lincoln. Hitchens' compassion is as sure as his ire is hot, making for a bracing and provocative collection.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other ‘profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information. Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.
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