Letters to a Young Contrarian
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- ISBN13: 9780465030330
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A witty, wise, biting, and completely individual meditation on what it means to reflect, live, and be to the contrary.
In the book that he was born to write, provocateur and best-selling leader Christopher Hitchens inspires future generations of radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, mad young (wo)men, and dissidents. Who better to speak to that person who finds him or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in profound and entertaining ways.
This book explores the entire range of “contrary positions”-from noble unorthodox to gratuitous pain in the butt. In an age of overly polite debate bending over backward to reach a pleased consensus within an increasingly centrist political dialogue, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast. He bemoans the loss of the skills of dialectical thinking evident in contemporary society. He understands the importance of disagreement-to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to right progress-heck, to democracy itself. Epigrammatic, spunky, witty, in your face, timeless and timely, this book is everything you would expect from a mentoring contrarian.Amazon.com Review
“Do justice, and let the skies fall.” Christopher Hitchens borrows from Roman antiquity this touchstone for a career of confrontation, argument, and troublemaking. Part of the Art of Mentoring series, Letters to a Young Contrarian is a trim volume of about two dozen letters to an imaginary student of controversy. The letters are wonderfully engaging–Hitchens is an exceptional prose artist–and from the outset they strike a self-reflective note. What Hitchens lionizes and illuminates in this book is not any particular disagreement, but a way of being perpetually at odds with the mainstream. “Humanity is very much in debt to such people,” he argues.
Hitchens’s style is incendiary and sometimes flamboyant. He relishes the role of provocateur and fancies himself a gadfly to the drowsy American republic. One of his main strengths is his erudition, allowing him to range over vast landscapes of the humanities and politics in a single breath. But he is also sometimes glib and self-satisfied, and his penchant for referencing everything in sight can be distracting. Nonetheless, his opinion are forceful and morally vital–and if the reader feels otherwise, there are few more fitting compliments to a professional unorthodox than dissent. –Eric de Place
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Christopher Hitchens places himself as a radical political contraire, desperately seeking to impart his wisdom to young students of foreign affairs; he gives answers to unasked questions and revels in his own glorious self. I like Hitchens and reflect he was once one of the fantastic journalists in the world, but lately his egotism and opportunism have gotten a small hard to take. Listen, to brashly and stupidly make an apology for the crimes of George W. Bush when you were once a self-proclaimed Trotskyite is not being “independent-minded,” it’s selling out. Notice how polemicists who change their worldview permanently seem to migrate towards the center of power, never the additional way around. This is a rather useless small book in which Hitchens is constantly building like and equating his style to George Orwell which is just pitiful, Orwell never had to directly impart his virtue to others in letter form, it was permanently right there in his novels and essays, and that is what Hitchens cant seem to know, a right journalistic unorthodox does not have to expound his views, they’re right there on the page, let the readers reflect for themselves. I’d like to see Hitchens return to the valuable work he has done in the past and stop trying to make a cheap buck off this schlock.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This is a book by a chronic kicker, a name who frequently cites Emile Zola but who has all the weight of “a young contrarian” wallowing in what is otherwise known as the terrible twos.
Don’t get me incorrect: Hitchens is very self-vital, his targets range from President Clinton to Mother Teresa, which earned him an interview with Vatican authorities in a “clogged room, a Bible, a tape-recorder, a Monsignor, a Deacon and a Father.” He spent years attacking Clinton, and was finally tickled when a name noted his piffle. But, this molehill of courage doesn’t write a word in this book about President Geoge Bush.
He says it’s courageous and vital to dissent. Nice. Welcome to an thought that has been celebrated since John Milton and the First Amendmant to the US Constitution. To guard his own brilliance, he doesn’t cite a single example of the how, when, where, why and what of anyone he’s criticized. His book is supposed to be “the art of mentoring,” but he limits it to praise of his own courage, insight, wit and weight.
Granted, Hitchens is a rare talent; his unique ability is being outrageous lacking being effective. He doesn’t cite a single example of his dissonance doing diddly squat. He offers feel-excellent whines, moans and complaints, but nothing constructive. It’s why late-night TV talk show monologues are the personification of today’s political commentary, humour, satire and weight.
He consistently attacks political compromise, praising “fanatics and absolutists like John Brown, who regarded compromise as a disgrace.” So — was Abraham Lincoln a second-rate president compared to a John Brown? This reflects the fantastic weakness of this book: Hitchens doesn’t know the difference between dissent and dissonance.
There’s a excellent reason why Hitchens is inconsequential compared to dissent such as Zola, Vaclav Havel and even Tom Lehrer — this rant is permanently safe, tame and respectable. It’s a perfect Hallowe’en gift, a fierce rubbery face meant to produce a shriek, a laugh and a comment, “Oh, how clever!” It’s fantastic sport for the two-year-ancient mentality.
“Most people, most of the time, prefer to seek praise or security,” Hitchens writes. This is his meagre attempt at respectability; he does so by citing fantastic dissenters and basking in their reflected courage, glory and weight. He falls far fleeting of being a court jester, missing the wit, wisdom, wiles and wariness to be significant.
Sadly, but not unexpectedly, he misses the mark.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book as it was recommended by a panelist on the Tina Brown show. I judge small information should be taken at face value unless it is well documented. Therefore, I have a horrible reputation as a contrarian who requires people to reflect and document when presenting me with an opinion. Obviously, in our current political environment where people are so mentally distressed that they can’t bother to know the additional side of an issue, it’s an appealing period.
I had hoped to read this book to better know my contrarian leanings or at a minimum to learn something of significance. Sorry to say, I did not. I did not find the book enjoyable at all. I establish the leader to be reasonably bombastic and reasonably the name dropper. Frequent anecdotes of past history are to some extent meaningful to frame how an unpopular thought process eventually changed political thinking but there are no current event anecdotes of significance.
I care to form no opinion positive or negative about Hitchens. Sorry to say, his writing just did not go me and maybe that’s my fault.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I like the thought and philospphy hitchens has but in his writing he gets to fancy and tries to bump up is writing with unnessasary fancy vocab you kind of get lost in this book becasue he uses at least 5 words per sentence you have to look up. im very excellent with vocab and nkow more words than my graduating class combined but hitchens overdoes it with this one , im dissipointed because i like the central thought and as a young dissenter i want all the advice adn knowledge possible but he makes it hard to get throught a capter lacking being confused and have to reflect about what that might mean.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
First, the publisher should get high inscription for producing such a excellent-looking book: its decipherable typeface and clean margins, made for a pleasant reading experience. Mr. Hitchens complements its production by his smoothly-written text. Hullo!: a man who makes you look up the word “repine” cannot be all terrible. He cannot be all excellent either. When he writes: “It doesn’t matter what one thinks, but how one thinks.” the mind reels. (At least this mind.) This formulation cannot stand. When Noam Chomsky remarks to an interlocutor that he esteems Angela Davis privileged than Alexandr I. Solzenhitsyn, it is of no interest to me how he arrived at such a silly opinion, only that he held it. This formulation also misses the very virtue of Orwell’s writings (which Mr. Hitchens has extolled elsewhere): that intellectuals (like non-intellectuals) can at times be right (e.g., J.M. Keynes’ aver that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were too harsh) and some times be incorrect (pardon any blows to amour-propre).
Dissent is necessary in a free and democratic society [especially during a Republican administration which likes, among additional things, the Fallacy of the Shifting Rationale]; a global distribution of Small Miss Marys,though, riding not “high horses” but particular hobbyhorses is as dispiriting as one filled with dogmatists.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5