I am a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens but not of this book. First of all it was too long and could have been better condensed by half. I did unearth some of the pearls I was seeking from Hitchens’ vast treasury of aphorisms, quotes, insults and wisdom. I think the best introduction to Hitchens is to read a few of his essays and to gain the total experience, one of his many books. There are also many speeches, debates and conversations with Hitchens on Youtube.

Here are a few of my favorites:

“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, ‘no child’s behind left.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.

The awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less.

The louder a man shouts for bombing and strafing, the less likely he is to have felt the weight of a pack.

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. ( )

I love Hitchens' writing - not always his opinions - but his writing is usually superb. That being said, reading it usually requires some context to fully appreciate. This book is a collection of out-of-context quotes on Hitchens' writing on various subjects. Sometimes the citation of when and where published is enough to give it some kind of context, or it refreshes your memory of having read it when originally published. But for the most part, it is a disservice to his work and less enjoyable that had the editor just selected 40 or 50 of his best essays and published them in their total. This is what I thought the book was when I picked it up. ( )

Reading a book of quotes by Christopher Hitchens inspires one to say, "Come on, Christopher, don't be so coy. Tell us what you really think." Seriously, though, this book of compiled quotes has some real gems - and some real clunkers. Someone should tell the man who compiled them that not everything that comes out of a great man's mouth is necessarily worthwhile, and some of these left me scratching my head wondering why they were included. Reading through these quotes also reminds me of how often Hitchens was right - and how often he was wrong. Atheists must always guard against the temptation to join the religious in canonizing their great spokesmen, and books like this can help as a corrective. I would have liked to see a bit less on Bill Clinton (already fading from the popular memory long before this book was written), or, if the author felt the need to make Bill Clinton one of the longest sections in the book, to cover the actual problems of the Clinton presidency, rather than focus, like any other prurient preacher, on Clinton's sexual pecadilloes, which were, for the most part, none of our business (even if he was less than decorous). It was also interesting to trace the changing of Hitchen's thought on interventionism in the Middle East from the first Gulf war to the second, and recognize that, at some point, he totally lost any semblance of objectivity and allowed his visceral hatred for Hussein to take over his rational side, to the point that he equated everybody who protested against a brutal, unilateral war of aggression with being "supporters of Saddam" or people who "loved Saddam Hussein". Overall, a collection that is thought provoking, inspiring, irritating, and, all too frequently, redundant and boring, the fault not so much of the source of the quotes as of the compiler. ( )

I don't always agree with the Hitch, but I always find him a delightful read. This is an essential companion to a person, like me, who only owns a few of his books, and to a person who might own ALL of his books. (Because it draws from all his works, articles, books, etc., it draws from more sources than any library would likely have.) From irreverent to thoughtful, from contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian to intelligent beyond all get out, the topics discussed here are far-ranging and exhaustive. A few things, the font size and format is a bit tedious, and since the topics are split up alphabetically, a running index at the top would have been nice and helpful. Finally, the "permissions" at the back serve as a sort of bibliography, but a bibliography of at least his books would have made this a grander reference than it already is. ( )