Quintessential Hitchens.
A well-selected anthology from the pen of the incomparable writer.
Hitchens contributed reviews and essays over a period of two decades for the London Review of Books, some of which are anthologized for the first time here. The anthology is memorable not just for the first-rate quality, but also for showcasing the author’s enviable range. Subjects include the defenestration of the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, which attracted the ire of Arthur Schlesinger; Salman Rushdie; P.G. Wodehouse; a trip to the 1995 Oscars with his son; and an incident in which Hitchens describes being spanked with a rolled-up order of Parliament by Margaret Thatcher (this last essay is worth the price of the book). The author’s profile of Bill Clinton serves as an extended precis of his book about the Clintons, No One Left to Lie To. During his long and celebrated career as a public intellectual, Hitchens often defined an educated person as one self-aware enough to know that he or she could never learn or read enough. Keeping that in mind while reading this entertaining anthology reinforces how much Hitchens did know and how well-read he was. To every piece, he brings what James Wolcott (a Hitchens colleague at Vanity Fair) describes in the foreword as the author's "armory of deep reading and lucid recall.” The quality, irony, and intelligence that marks his work leaves readers wishing Hitchens were around to comment upon the current state of affairs, particularly concerning state-sponsored censorship and coercion—not to mention the general lack of quality of what passes for political leadership. But readers can well enough guess given the following from an essay about the first Iraq War: “There were a thousand ways for a superpower to avert war with a mediocre local despotism without losing face. But the syllogisms of power don’t correspond very exactly to reason.”
Quintessential Hitchens.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757659
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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