Christopher HitchensResenhas

Sickening. I waited until Kissinger died to read this because I don't think I could handle it while I had to share air with this sentient pond scum. Christopher Hitchens is a good writer, which makes the whole experience ten times worse.

Just as I enjoyed reading William Buckley despite our sometimes marked political differences, I enjoyed reading these old essays of Hitchens from the London Review of Books. He is someone who wrote:

Concerning those who declined to criticize the fatwa against Salman Rushdie because of their purported multiculturalism: It is impossible to be sufficiently irritated by such people.

Of the Mormon church's International Genealogical Index: a classical piece of micro-megalomania where the monstrous scale of the effort dwarfs the essential pettiness of the enterprise.

Of antisemitism: A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject.

Concerning Sir Rhodes Boyson's comment that caning had done him no harm: Why do people invariably make this claim; usually before anyone has asked them?
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Problems with this collection included:
1. the sometimes eventual numbing pattern of Hitchen's writing that recalled Wolcott Gibbs' famous satire of Time magazine, Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

2. pieces about which I knew little – I know who Harold Wilson was, but it was difficult to follow arch comments about the members of his cabinet and their friends and acquaintances.

3. Hitch could, it is said, bang these essays out in a very short time. In some cases, the structure of the essay might have benefited from slightly longer contemplation.

I have this book duplicated.
A powerful book. Hitchens is merciless in his critique of religion..although he claims connections with Church of England, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish faiths he merely uses these connections as tools to skewer the various faiths. He writes in a slightly annoying way.....a little too flowery ; a little too many historical or literary allusions which are not explained. Kind of talking down to his audience or assuming a breadth of knowledge that many would probably not possess. Just one instance of this that I recall was Lysenko (The Russian head of the Institute of Genetics and in charge of plant breeding in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He rejected mendelian genetics and consequently set Russian science backwards for a generation....those who opposed him were purged). However, Hitchens merely throws in a sideways reference to Lysenko....so insignificant that I can't relocate it or find it in the index. And frequently the Hitchen's prose is a little too flowery to easily follow. He loves hyperbole....for example: "Joshua's blood-soaked tribesmen"; "two extremely unctuous British Muslims". Sometimes this is quite entertaining and humorous ...sometimes a little tedious. He keeps referring to humans as "mammals". True...and I guess it is a way of keeping us grounded that we don't get carried away with the idea that a high priest is really anything other than a mammal who has come to dominate his patch.
A couple of basic themes: religion is man made, faith provides an excuse for horrific treatment of others who don't share the same faith/beliefs....and "religion comes from the period of human history where nobody......had the slightest idea what was going on".
There is a welter of detail here. Thousands of miniature case studies of the way in which religion is inconsistent, has lead to bad outcomes and in Hitchen's terms: "has poisoned everything".
On balance, a powerful and convincing book. Hard to read it and still have the same respect for any of the religions...though maybe the Cathars deserve some respect for their life style and refusal to recant.
I give it five stars despite Hitchen's somewhat difficult style.
His is certainly a strong voice for reason, logic and evidence based practice as opposed to magic, religion and appeals to "faith".

We sure miss Hitchens. My wife and I had the great pleasure of hearing him speak in Toronto about the time he discovered he had cancer. He was a delightful speaker, and this is the book that rattled a few cages. You can still find his debates and interviews on many podcasts. Another reason I love the iTunes store.

Hitchens is an entertaining writer. He's at his best when he's insulting people, which makes the chapters on Mormonism and Islam in this book fun reading.

One problem is that, those two examples aside, this book is redundant with Dawkins' superior title on the same subject.

The second problem is one he shares with Dawkins -- his insistance that the evil done by people in the name of religion is the fault of religion, while the good done by the religious would have been done by them even without religion. Thus, even after they've convinced us that religion is intellectually wrong and historically a source of evil, they lack credibility when arguing that religion, in the here and now, does more harm then good.

He uses lots of big words and presupposes more knowledge of the subject than I have. Lots of great info (read ammo) May have to reread to get more to stick.

From Lucretius to Karl Marx to Richard Dawkins and many others, the case is being made

This book was so crap I forgot I'd even read it and then couldn't remember any of the arguments used. Turns out it's mostly just "religious people often do bad things" (woah, no kidding) with his usual condescension and racism. Awful.

È incredibile come nel XXI secolo ancora ci siano credenti che si aspettano che un ateo si converta sul punto di morte per paura dell’inferno o comunque dell’aldilà: è così difficile immaginare di ritenere che la morte sia la fine del nostro essere?

Eppure riesco a pensare a poche cose che tirino fuori la nostra umanità come vedere una persona che sta morendo, con le sue debolezze esposte, e provare compassione per tutto il male fatto e ricevuto, del tutto insensato visto il poco tempo che passiamo in vita, e per tutto il bene fatto e ricevuto, che rischia in gran parte di andare perduto; e poi finire per estendere quella compassione a noi stessə, fragili e umanə, proprio come chi sta morendo, raggiungendo una vicinanza con gli altri esseri umani che prescinde qualsiasi religione o differenza.

Hitchens avrebbe odiato questo discorso smielatissimo. Magari avrebbe detto che lui non voleva nessuna vicinanza con unə qualunque stronzə fondamentalista di una qualunque religione. Difficile dargli torto: i cancri, che siano tumori del corpo o ideologie autoritarie, non possono che suscitare il nostro ribrezzo, dato tutto il carico di sofferenza che portano con loro.

Sono in disaccordo con diverse posizioni di Hitchens (e la noncuranza con la quale parla di cure all’avanguardia in un Paese, gli USA, dove parecchia gente non può permettersi nemmeno quelle standard, è piuttosto raccapricciante), ma Mortalità è un libriccino da leggere per ricordarci che, nel bene e nel male, siamo soprattutto – se non soltanto – un corpo mortale.

Essendo atea agnostica e frequentando discussioni dove la Chiesa cattolica ha pochi fan, conoscevo di fama il contenuto di questo breve saggio del 1995 e alla fine mi è sembrato giusto leggere l’originale e non solo articoli che lo citavano come fonte. Penso comunque non ci sia bisogno di riassumerne il contenuto, visto che ormai è largamente conosciuto (altrimenti potete farvi un giretto su Wikipedia e poi tornare qui).

L’aspetto che mi ha colpito di più e che per motivi biografici non ho vissuto in prima persona visto che Madre Teresa è morta quando ero ancora bambina è stato l’atteggiamento completamente acritico con il quale tutti sembravano approcciarsi alla donna. Hitchens stesso racconta di essere quasi “caduto vittima” del fascino di Madre Teresa (che, diciamocelo, in Occidente chiamiamo tutti così perché non abbiamo idea di come pronunciare il suo vero nome, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu).

Infatti, nonostante le sue posizioni dogmatiche e la mole di soldi che convergeva nell’ordine da lei fondato, pare che quasi nessuno si facesse troppe domande e sarebbe molto interessante capirne il motivo. Faceva sentire e/o apparire più buone le persone? Esorcizzava il senso di colpa dei ricchi? Sembrava una così cara vecchina che era ritenuta incapace di sbagliare? Un mix di tutto questo e chissà cos’altro?

La posizione della missionaria è un libriccino molto interessante, peccato sia un po’ troppo corto e un po’ poco organizzato: non so se perché sia stato pensato come integrazione al documentario Hell’s Angel, al quale Hitchens aveva dato il suo contributo e che era uscito nel 1994, oppure perché l’autore, a dispetto delle sue doti dialettiche, si sia lasciato trascinare dall’astio per Madre Teresa (o forse da quello per chi le aveva assegnato il Nobel per la pace?).

Sto scrivendo la recensione di Dio non è grande: ecco, magari ora che l’ho messo nero su bianco mi verrà qualche brillante idea per dare un senso al casino che ho nella testa.

Il fatto è che sono contemporaneamente d’accordo e in disaccordo con Hitchens: bello, vero? Sì, facilita alla grande la stesura di una recensione che abbia una qualche parvenza di senso. D’altra parte, è difficile non essere d’accordo con lui quando si incazza con le istituzioni e i gruppi religiosi per aver contribuito alla diffusione dell’epidemia di AIDS da HIV in Africa o per aver impedito l’eradicazione della poliomielite tramite la vaccinazione.

È altrettanto difficile non condividere le sue considerazioni sui cosiddetti miracoli, che ho sentito tante volte lasciare indifferenti (e a volte anche un po’ schifat*) tant* credenti. D’altro canto, se hai la fede, che diamine di motivo dovresti avere di cercare delle prove? Si chiama fede proprio perché è senza prove ed è irrazionale: è inutile scomodare la ragione e poi lamentarsi se questa se la ride dei tentativi di dimostrare inconfutabilmente l’esistenza di un dio.

Cosa è andato storto con questa lettura, quindi? Io non penso che estirpare la religione ci darà automaticamente un mondo migliore. Sì, le religioni ancora oggi si macchiano di orrendi crimini in nome dei loro stupidi principi o dei presunti dettami delle loro divinità, ma io non riesco a ignorare tutt* quei/quelle credenti che cercano nel loro piccolo di cambiare le cose. Trovo scellerato e profondamente ingiusto che un* fedele cattolic* debba vedersi rappresentat* nei dibattiti televisivi da un triste figuro come Adinolfi – o almeno dopo non lamentatevi dello svuotamento delle chiese.

Il problema, secondo me, è questa assurda volontà di mettere la fede davanti a tutto. Non dubito del fatto che sia un’importante componente della vita di una persona, ma non dovrebbe mai essere anteposta alla ragione e all’empatia. La fede (qualunque fede), lasciata lassù in cima, da sola, finisce per accecare le persone e far fare loro cose terribili, nel tentativo di adattare il mondo alla loro visione monodimensionale.

Quindi, meno fede e più cuore e cervello per tutt*, grazie: siamo parecchi* su questa pallina con più acqua che terre emerse e ci sono già così tante sofferenze (malattie, catastrofi naturali…) indipendenti dal nostro operato che sarebbe davvero il caso di limitare i nostri contributi al numero delle morti ingiuste.

This book was not "dark", as I would expect from the title.

One of the memorable quotes from this book: “It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”. pg 67

Does it frighten me to be reading such material? Well, no, not frightening - but it some way it elevates my consciousness, my awareness, that this fate awaits me as well. And I wish I could have known Hitchens, even attended one of his eight hour dinner parties.

It seems to me that this book is Hitchen’s attempt to let us know what dying is like, how it happens. And it is a testament to his will to keep living to the end. “Living dyingily” he called it.

A beautifully written collection of early-Hitchens. There are perhaps a few too many articles on the minutiae of 1980s scandals such as the "Iran-Contra affair" but overall well worth reading.

The lack of a proper Contents page is irritating. There are five section headings, with their page numbers, but nothing for the individual essays within each section. Also no index.

A beautifully written collection of essays and articles showcasing Hitchens' range. Readers familiar with previous collections will recognise favourite references (Waugh, Orwell, Auden etc.) deployed with to great effect. I found the final post-Iraq war articles poignant as one can't help feeling that the author was desperate to believe that the occupation would succeed.

CH's erudition on Orwell is very impressive and the smoothness of his acerbity is frequently entertaining. He does answer the question, "Why does Orwell matter?" on the book's last page:
that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

Or, in my own abbreviated summary, Orwell lived an exposed mostly Leftist intellectual life, with occasional vacillations and, in retrospect, some misogyny and homophobia, but he tried to have an honest and rational approach to his convictions.

Hitchens spends some time running down Orwell's fiction, and ultimately I don't think the title's implied question is really answered since I think most of Orwell's readers would respond simply that the reason that he matters is that he wrote well about things that mattter, then and now.

Lastly, in terms of lines of print, this book is mostly Hitchens criticizing the critics of Orwell. This can dry things out rather extensively, and consequently, I did not feel that I was brought closer to Orwell in the same way that I did, for example, in the author's book on Thomas Paine.

A short political-literary biography of one of Chris Hitchen's heroes and role models, Thomas Paine. Just a pleasure to read. I especially enjoyed learning:

The actual usage of Samuel Johnson's "...last refuge of a scoundrel" comment.
That the key to the Bastille hangs at Mt. Vernon to this day.
The origin of the association of May Day with labor.
That Paine may have coined the name, The United States of America.
Paine's involvement with the French Revolution and his imprisonment there.
The origin of the association of "left" and the "right" with liberal and conservative.
The actual usage of Karl Marx's "...opiate of the masses" comment.
The amount of the Declaration of Independence that comes from Locke.

In the discussion of The Age of Reason, CH cannot restrain himself from almost participating in Paine's attack on organized religion, but far from being a detriment to the work, I found it as much a pleasure as watching old videos of Hitchens on YouTube.

A wide ranging collection of essays, poems and selections from larger works arranged chronologically, starting with a selection from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and ending with part of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's How and why I became an Infidel. Even the seasoned atheist is likely to find something "new" here: there is an excellent introduction by Chris Hitchens, a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun with the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, a discussion of the TV evangelist equivalents of her time by Mary Ann Evans, the thoughts of Charles Darwin from his autobiography, the unusually vitriolic comments of Samuel Clemens, an entertaining list of Einstein's attempts to deny his belief in the supernatural (many wanted the "smartest man" to be religious), and more from Emma Goldman, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ian McEwan and Philip Larkin. I found Martin Gardner's history of the idea of the wandering Jew, Sam Harris' discussion of the persecution of witches and antisemitism and Ibn Warraq's discussion of the Koran and Sharia law to be unusually interesting. All the selections can't be equally strong, but my only negative comment would be that I had the opportunity to be reminded how extraordinarily opaque the writing of Karl Marx is.

One man's brilliance highlighted by the prosaic details of his last days. I think this is some of CH's best writing.

One can't agree with every position that Hitchens takes in these 107 essays published the year that he died, but it is almost always a pleasure to read him, and you are likely to learn some new words, quotes, and history from his massive erudition.

I like CH as a talking head and author. I guess everybody shouldn't write their autobiography. He is egotistical, childish and cruel. Could be edited and used as a preface for God is not great. I highly recommend his new 10 commandments - check You Tube.

Christopher Hitchens professes a great admiration for Oscar Wilde in this book - mainly for Wilde's wit, but you can see that Hitchens is also influenced by Wilde's public facade. Like Morrissey, it's hard to tell what about Hitchens is real and what is adopted persona - in "Letters to a Young Contrarian" he writes in earnest about the necessity of noconformity to the survival of modern liberal society, but he also likes to show off his breadth of knowledge, his acidity and mercilessness towards cowards and fools, and his literary connections. I think Hitchens sees himself as a classical man of letters, but also concerns himself a little too much with sparring with people and crafting his own public image. That said, we could use a lot more of people like Hitchens in the public sphere.

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Hitchens is always so darn readable, and his wit is well-suited to the subject matter here.

Although I am not convinced that Christopher Hitchens was all that good at debating, he was a marvelous essayist, able to muster striking references to bolster his discussion. His book reviews, frequently published in The Atlantic magazine, are excellent.

My complaint about this volume, which was published after Hitchens' death, is with the editor, not the author.

While there are conventions associated with editing a book of essays, the overall goal is to allow the reader to read for the joy of learning something. The editor's work is to assist in the choice of essays to be presented and the way that the text is used.

My first and largest complaint is that the date and place of original publication is located at the end of the text. The essays are not presented chronologically or by theme and while we are reading we have no clue other than context to allow us to date the work in the context of his career. Hitchens started writing seriously in the 1980s and I argue that knowing the time of first appearance at the beginning is more useful than at the end, especially when, in a book review for example, a footnote appears at the bottom of the first page naming the book being reviewed but not when and where the review was published. That info is at the end of the essay. This split presentation is ferociously annoying when the citation is simply split with no punctuation at the end of the final word in the footnote. The remainder of the citation and the correct punctuation, come later.

My other big complaint is that while most of the essays in these books are easy to follow, there is not much explanation given when the topic under discussion might be unrecognizable to a non-local - in the case a UK reader who might not be overly familiar with US political silliness or vice-versa. A few NB from the editors would be helpful.

Anyway, this is a book to own, not borrow, so that you can pick it up off the shelf and read in an odd moment. The essays, or most of them anyway, will always satisfy.½

I really appreciate this type of book, where a relentless focus on one small topic allows you to feel like an issue has actually been settled—I felt the same way about [b:The Mismeasure of Man|54218|The Mismeasure of Man|Stephen Jay Gould|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924672l/54218._SY75_.jpg|1235400]. However, where Gould was just laying out the best case he could in the clearest language possible, Hitchens was more of a cat toying with its prey. Unfortunately, he's so convinced that he's right (which, to be fair, he is) that his language gets a bit pompous at times, but, in the end, I'm not going to begrudge him a few rhetorical flourishes.

CUPRINS

1. Pentru a ne exprima in termeni moderati - pag. 9
2. Religia ucide - pag. 27
3. Scurta digresiune despre porc sau de ce e sunca progonita in Rai - pag. 59
4. Nota despre sanatate si despre cum iti poate dauna religia - pag. 66
5. Speculatiile metafizice ale religiei sunt false - pag. 94
6. Argumentul ceasornicarului - pag. 108
7. Revelatia: cosmarul "Vechiului" Testament - pag. 143
8. "Noul" Testament e si mai malefic decat "Vechiul" Testament - pag. 159
9. Coranul a imprumutat miturile evreilor si ale crestinilor - pag. 179
10. Kitschul miraculosului si declinul iadului - pag. 201
11. "Amprenta umila a originii lor": inceputurile corupte ale religiei - pag. 223
12. Cum moare o religie - pag. 244
13. Ne face religia mai buni ? - pag. 250
14. Nu exista solutie "orientala" - pag. 282
15. Religia ca pacat originar - pag. 296
16. Jertfele sangeroase - pag. 297
17. Ispasirea - pag. 301
18. Pedeapsa vesnica si reguli imposibil de urmat - pag. 304
19. Ajunge religia sa comita abuzuri asupra copiilor ? - pag. 312
20. Anticiparea unei obiectii: un efort disperat de a formula o "acuza" impotriva laicismului - pag. 330
21. O traditie superioara: rezistenta ratiunii - pag. 366
22. In concluzie: necesitatea unui nou Iluminism - pag. 400

23. Multumiri - pag. 411
24. Note - pag. 415
25. Index - pag. 421