Staking a Life

By Christopher Hitchens

Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the flavor and relish of the business of judicially inflicted death.

More: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/christopher-hitchens-staking-a-life.php?page=all

Christopher Hitchens debates Barry Brummett, Part 1

Debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Barry Brummett (Chair, Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin) on the resolution "Religion has been a positive force in culture," June 4, 2011.

In Defense of Endless War

As 9/11 showed, civilization has enemies with which peace is neither possible nor desirable.
By Christopher Hitchens

A continuous and repetitive thread in the commentary on the decade since 9/11—one might almost call it an endless and open-ended theme—was the plaintive observation that the struggle against al-Qaida and its surrogates is somehow a "war without end."

Read More: http://www.slate.com/id/2304120/

Think Inc Update

We have just received word from Christopher Hitchens' management.

He had a medical emergency over the weekend but is now back at home and is doing ok, all things considered. He was not available to communicate before this morning. He is quite upset that he missed this event as he has never had to cancel at the very last minute before.

More: http://www.facebook.com/notes/think-inc/update-christopher-hitchens/236424399743658

V.F. Portrait: Joan Didion

In The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 best-seller, Joan Didion dissected the trauma of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. With Blue Nights, to be published in November by Knopf, she agonizingly explores the heavier blow that followed: the death of their daughter, Quintana Roo.

Christopher Hitchens contemplates a tragic achievement.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/10/joan-didion-201110

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens: review

The Telegraph | Christopher Hitchens’s provocative journalism is greater than the sum of its parts, argues Nicholas Shakespeare as he reviews Arguably.

Every generation tends to look silly to the one after; those beehive hairdos, those chain smokers. Reacting to previous experience, we don’t make progress, necessarily. Vicars have randy daughters and randy daughters give birth to boys who in turn become vicars.

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8765444/Arguably-by-Christopher-Hitchens-review.html

Man of His Words

The New York Times | Sunday Book Review

"Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit."

Don't miss the Book Review Podcast (Bill Keller on the career of Christopher Hitchens). 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/arguably-essays-by-christopher-hitchens-book-review.html

From 9/11 to the Arab spring

By Christopher Hitchens

Three men: Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamedeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu – a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur and a Libyan husband and father. In the spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/09/christopher-hitchens-911-arab-spring

There's just one Hitch

The Australian Reviews Arguably.

LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.

 "I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried."

 As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age. No novelist or poet has registered the texture of the past decade as pungently as Hitchens has in the essay form.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts-arc/theres-just-one-hitch/story-e6frg8nf-1226126501899

Simply Evil

A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.
By Christopher Hitchens


The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either.

http://www.slate.com/id/2303013/

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Reviewed by Vinton Rafe McCabe / New York Journal of Books

“Christopher Hitches has the eye of a painter and the literary skill of a novelist. He infuses his essays with the same narrative thrust that can be found in the most addictive fiction.”

"Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens proves as mercurial as the man himself; it is at times infuriating, tedious, educational, gloriously candid, and completely hilarious. The man has an opinion on everything—literally everything from the genius of Charles Dickens to the virtues of masturbation."

Read review here (nyjournalofbooks.com)

3 min. audio clip from Arguably, read by Simon Prebble: http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/audiobooks/book/Christopher-Hitchens-Arguably-MP3-Download/10103043.html

2012 Global Atheist Convention

Tickets on sale now!
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
Lawrence Krauss..

http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/
http://www.facebook.com/atheistconvention
http://twitter.com/#!/atheistcon

Rick Perry's God

Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic religious rhetoric, or is he just pandering for votes?
By Christopher Hitchens

"I happened to spend several weeks in Texas earlier this year, while the Lone Star State lay under the pitiless glare of an unremitting drought. After a protracted arid interval, the state's immodest governor, Rick Perry, announced that he was using the authority vested in him to call for prayers for rain."

Read More (Slate)

The Crimes of Col. Qaddafi

In the euphoria of the current celebrations, we must not lose sight of the former leader's foul deeds.
By Christopher Hitchens

"In George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, his narrator, George Bowling, broods on the special horrors of the new totalitarianism and notices "the colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons," but also, less obviously perhaps, "the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke."

Read More (Slate)