And Yet ...; Essays

New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. First Simon and Schuster hardcover edition [stated]. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. vi, [4], 339, [3] pages. Occasional footnotes. Index. Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) was a British-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, journalist, and social critic. Hitchens was the author, or editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays on culture, politics and literature. He contributed to New Statesman, The Weekly Standard, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. He broke from the political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the left to the Satanic Verses controversy, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. His writings include critiques of public figures Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger,and others. He regarded concepts of a god as a totalitarian belief that impedes individual freedom. He argued in favor of free expression and scientific discovery, and that it was superior as an ethical code of conduct for human civilization. Derived from a Kirkus review: Hitherto uncollected journalistic pieces, in which Hitchens takes stock of the world. Hitchens was famously a man of the left who, all the same, found reasons to support going to war in Iraq, a libertarian who nonetheless saw the uses of government, and an atheist who'd read the Bible more than most Sunday school teachers-and a contrarian through and through. Hitchens could be a fierce critic of the American theocracy that the majority seems to prefer the splendid secular holiday of Thanksgiving. One of the most thoughtful essays in this gathering takes on the widely admired novelist Orhan Pamuk for not being sufficiently stalwart in his defense of the secular Turkish state against the Islamists who would ban literature. Whip-smart, Hitchens is at his best when skewering the political class, though with the understanding that what we have now is likely to be a sight better than what's to come. There's probably more in the vault-that's a very good thing indeed.