Luckily, the likes of Joe Scarborough and Sean Hannity don’t get to determine the legacy of this man; at least not for anyone who knew him, or followed his work. e. his position on the Iraq war- which he doesn't get to at all in this book) or just plain windbaggy. Despite its short length (141 pages) I found myself constantly going back over passages (this book has a ton of great quotes). In each case, as we know now, the authorities were forced first to act crassly and then to look crass, and eventually to fall victim to stern verdicts from posterity. I could extract a handful of great quotations but generally found its subtlety muddled and the italicized foreign phrases snotty and maybe he used "tautology" too often for me to really get all psyched?

Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"--from noble dissident to gratuitous nag--Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. I have to admit, and not without some degree of shame, that prior to picking up this book I had shunned the author for the most part as someone whose views diverged too sharply from my own to be of any interest to me. I often appear uninterested (often enough, I am), in what other people are saying to me, or I am insufferable and condescending. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.He prepares for, and anticipates attacks on himself; and throughout his career (and life), he has addressed them head-on.

When told of the death of the late Jerry Falwell, a bigoted charlatan if ever there was one, Hitchens exclaimed "Give him an enema and you could bury him in a matchbox. Your last letter reached me just as I was reading the essays of Aldous Huxley, creator of our notion of a "Brave New World". Hitchens's endorsement of Kenneth Starr may have been boldly heterodox in his own circle, but it was heartily applauded in others. This book not only inspires the radical in a general sense, but Hitchens also delves into the issues which he himself had a lot of experience in being that "radical" voice.This slim volume is a series of letters to aspiring radicals, which is to say, people wishing to emulate Hitchens’ philosophy. I wish to learn the pressure points of conventional wisdom, so that I might subdue those who advocate it using only a bottle of absinthe and my thumbs. As a species, we may by all means think ruefully about the waste and horror produced by war and other forms of rivalry and jealousy. What is shameful though, is holding a minority viewpoint and conceding to your detractors on that basis.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was the author of Letters to a Young Contrarian, and the bestseller No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. Happily, the intellectual public mostly embraced this public intellectual, and realized his worth in a miscellany of areas. Eines meiner Lieblingszitate aus dem Buch ist folgendes: "The essence of the independent mind lies not in what he thinks, but in how he thinks.The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination. I have been proven wrong before, and I have changed my mind about things of which I have not been proven wrong. He at times threated to lose his cool completely, sounding occasionally rather bloodthirsty and humourless. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. The word hasn't completely lost this association even now, though it is less frequently used as an insult.

What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.The word antitheism smacks of a shaking-ones-fist-at-the-sky quality and Hitchens’ detractors are quick to point this out.