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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 28 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad.
Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for the enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, Arguably burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as - to quote Christopher Buckley - our "greatest living essayist in the English language."
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Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general audience. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed to write his novel of the downtrodden despite a revolution, a coup d'etat, and political exile.
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The making of a classic!
- By Karen Creeden on 05-27-20
By: David Bellos
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Embracing Defeat
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- Narrated by: Edward Lewis
- Length: 21 hrs and 38 mins
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This illuminating study explores the ways in which the shattering defeat of the Japanese in World War II, followed by over six years of American military occupation, affected every level of Japanese society. The author describes the countless ways in which the Japanese met the challenge of "starting over", from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, and activities of ordinary men and women in every walk of life.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner!
- By KF on 10-09-07
By: John W. Dower
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Angels and Ages
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Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.
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Connecting Darwin and Lincoln
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By: Adam Gopnik
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Heroes
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In this enlightening and entertaining work, Johnson presents heroism through examples in history. From Alexander to Joan of Arc and George Washington to Marilyn Monroe, here are men and women from every age and corner of the world who have inspired and transformed their cultures and the world itself.
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Interesting, but deeply flawed
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By: Paul Johnson
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The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
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It's time for us to re-examine the past. Our lives are infinitely richer if we take the time to look at what the Greeks and Romans have given us in politics and law, religion and philosophy and education, and to learn how people really lived in Athens, Rome, Sparta, and Alexandria. This is a book with a serious point to make, but the author isn't simply a classicist but a comedian and broadcaster who has made television and radio documentaries about humour, education, and Dorothy Parker.
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Brilliant book; new recording so much better
- By Ross Bennett on 12-13-14
By: Natalie Haynes
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The War on the West
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
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Passionate Sage
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John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of our nation and its second president, spent nearly the last third of his life in retirement, grappling with contradictory views of his place in history and fearing his reputation would not fare well in the generations after his death. And indeed, future generations did slight him, elevating Jefferson and Madison to lofty heights while Adams remained way back in the second tier.
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Stays true to Audible's description
- By Neil on 10-24-09
By: Joseph J. Ellis
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Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices past and present that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, and more.
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Truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
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In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris' recent best-seller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos.
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5-Star Writing. Perfect Author Narration.
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In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett filmed a landmark discussion about modern atheism. The video went viral. Now, the transcript of their conversation is illuminated by new essays from three of the original participants and an introduction by Stephen Fry.
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Short
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Few books in history have been as poorly understood as the Qur'an. In this audiobook, the distinguished historian of religion Bruce Lawrence shows precisely how the Qur'an is Islam. He describes the origins of the faith and assesses its influence on today's societies and politics. Above all, he emphasizes that the Qur'an is a sacred book of signs that has no single message. It is a book that demands interpretation and one that can be properly understood only through its history.
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Not quite enough
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In No One Left to Lie To, a New York Times best seller, Christopher Hitchens casts an unflinching eye on the Clinton political machine and offers a searing indictment of a president who sought to hold power at any cost. With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right, and he argues that the president's personal transgressions were ultimately inseparable from his political corruption.
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Half the book
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A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions - not the other way around. With characteristic élan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative.
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America need look no further than its own lauded leaders for a war criminal whose offenses rival those of the most heinous dictators in recent history: Henry Kissinger. Employing evidence based on firsthand testimony, unpublished documents, and new information uncovered by the Freedom of Information Act, and using only what would hold up in international courts of law, The Trial of Henry Kissinger outlines atrocities authorized by the former secretary of state in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and more.
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A perfect gift for your favorite history buff, or for your own collection, this audio set from the acclaimed Eminent Lives series is a must for anyone interested in the story of America.
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Great history
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At the time of his death, Christopher Hitchens was the most notorious atheist in the world. And yet, all was not as it seemed. "Nobody is not a divided self, of course," he once told an interviewer, "but I think it's rather strong in my case." Hitchens was a man of many contradictions: a Marxist in youth who longed for acceptance among the social elites; a peacenik who revered the military; a champion of the Left who was nonetheless pro-life, pro-war-on-terror; and, after 9/11, something of a neocon.
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I shouldn’t be surprised at the duplicity of the author
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"Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years," writes Sam Harris. "Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this...should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."
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the examined life
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Hitch-22: A Memoir: Booktrack Edition
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Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the US and the UK. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the US war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. He sees all sides of an argument and believes the personal is political.
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More audible problems
- By Francoise on 10-23-18
What listeners say about Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
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- Davol2449
- 09-02-11
Grab it
These essays are extremely varied in subject matter and tone and make a worthy addition to the last Hitchens works recorded for audio (usually by the author but, given his current medical condition, this seems not really feasible right now even if Hitch is, far and away, his own best reader). There are lots of political essays, but a whole lot of his extended literary essays (many from The Atlantic and Vanity Fair), which are often an extraordinary pleasure, as well as being exceedingly well-judged. I am a lunatic for books like this, and this is now one of my favorite Audible offerings (this past year or so, others along the same lines include Tony Judt's Reappraisals and Simon Callow's A Life in Pieces, which you need to check out if you go for responsible left wing politics and theatre history, which are two preoccupations of mine.). The four stars ratings are only because Simon Prebble is wonderful, but isn't Hitch and because I would have chosen a few different essays. Otherwise, this is a true five-star, highly recommended selection. The price is also great, considering how much you get.
Keep this sort of thing up, please.
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- Cora Judd
- 09-27-11
The book to have while stranded on a desert island
???Arguably??? is great but it is not of the ???god is Not Great??? genre; it's a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens??? own essays, and of a vaster scope than the global-fallout-from-religion that the 'god' title focuses on. It is riveting in just the same way, however, and the temptation to adopt Hitchens' lucid opinions as my own is also similar.
???Arguably??? covers a wild variety of topics. Some I may not have typically sought out but all are worth reading and for me, re-reading. It has introduced many intriguing new titles, authors and subjects for my to-read stack. I???ve kept the globe spinning and Wikipedia fired-up throughout; memorized a little of the Rubayat and seen Animal Farm acted out in many times and places. The political essays are more than a few ranks above my typical American understanding but my perceptions are a bit sharper for having read them anyway (and my position on torture is validated). His graphic, sumi-style images from his experiences in Viet Nam, Cuba, Pakistan, Iran and many more, are intense. While reading, (I also bought the print version for proper mulling over), I???ve lost my optimism for humankind a few times, and re-found it almost the same number.
If I had a complaint, it???s that, at 749 pages, it???s still too short. Thankfully, everything Hitchens has written is archived "somewhere". In all, ???Arguably??? is brilliant and it???s the perfect book for a reader who wants to level up a few.
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- Grant
- 08-03-12
I'm not worthy. Or this book isn't.
It just comes down to this. While I am a huge Hitchens fan and have enjoyed several of his other works, I just didn't give enough of a crap about people like John Updike, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to get through the middle of this very long work. Call me uncultured. I had to turn it off. That's the problem with audiobooks of collections of essays. They are, by definition, linear. And the table of contents is not sitting right there before your eyes. (A hint to Amazon and Audible: a clickable TOC might be a nice upgrade for the Audible app's functionality...) So if one hits a boring patch, it is far more likely that the listener will stop rather than skip ahead. Perhaps I will go forward and cherry pick some other bits of Hitchens to savor in the future, but as a whole, I doubt I will ever get through this beast in its entirety. RIP, sir. Your work and legacy are both intact. I'm just too unapologetically bourgeois to consume every single word of it.
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- Michael
- 12-11-11
Too much good stuff for audio alone
This is a really nice set of reviews and essays. The best is when he personally undergoes waterboarding. The worst part about this audio book is there are too many references I wanted to note to remember. The only way to effectively listen to this book is to be doing nothing else and have paper and pen handy, which kind of eliminates the usefulness of an audio version (for the sighted). I did not agree with everything I heard, but virtually everything was interesting or thought provoking. The narration was simply awesome.
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- Robert
- 01-23-13
Pure unadulterated Hitchens
Pure Hitchens; he throws lots of $hit here with little bull. Except for the "funny women" thing, which I'm not sure Hitchens actually meant as many have taken it, each essay is brilliant.
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- Sean
- 10-16-11
Worthy of many re-readings
This collection both challenged and entertained me. It was my first exposure to this cosmopolitan polymath and seems like a good primer. Being collected from 3 different magazines over a decade full of change, conflict and innovation broadens the scope of the book beyond most collections. The author discusses literature in his book reviews in the Atlantic, current affairs in Slate and social commentary in Vanity Fair. I think the Slate pieces were my favorite because they felt most genuine--the writing is less formal and the opinions more intense. There are many laugh out loud passages and many more "I've never considered it that way" moments.
The narration is spot on. Simon Prebble bites off and chews up the prose with just the right mix of confidence and humor. You get the sense that he really grasps what he is reading and not just performing a script.
Having just discovered him I am very upset that this will be his last book. However, he has been so prolific that there is little danger of ever exhausting his rich intellectual vein.
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- Kristopher
- 11-09-11
Written with skill and style
This was my first exposure to Hitchens' writing and I was blown away. I have never come across another author whose skill with the English language left me shaking my head in wonder. His knowledge of literature is astounding and the ability to pull apart books and essays in reviews and then combine the contents with information from various sources and his personal experience is breathtaking.
Some of the content is heavy, reviewing authors from the 1920s and 30s while other essays focus on contemporary issues. You will likely need ready access to a dictionary and wikipedia to thoroughly understand some of the topics but several essays inspired me to go back and pick up some of the classic books of literature.
Some people may argue with his conclusions or disagree with his political views but I don't think anyone could argue with the incredible wordsmith power.
Simon Prebble, the narrator deserved extra credit as well. Phenomenal job. You'd think it was Hitchens reading his own book. Prebble delivers the difficult text with emotion and confidence - a pleasure to listen to.
It was definetly worth the credit and I've already picked up another Hitchens' tilte on Audible.
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- O.
- 02-08-13
Stirred and Shaken
I listened to the 28 hours 26 minutes, which covered 107 essays, most which had been published in The Atlantic, Slate, Vanity Fair or the NYTimes during the 2000’s. I had never heard of Christopher Hitchens prior to this and for whatever reason it was that the book caught my attention and on impulse, I purchased it, I will forever be grateful for the unknown motivation that propelled me to do so. I cannot remember the last time that I felt such amazement at someone’s ability to speak so interestingly and well about such a wide variety of topics. Repeatedly I found myself thinking, “How could one person be so brilliant?” Even if I didn’t always agree with the content of what he was discussing or even understand what he was talking about, I found myself amazed at his command of the English language, vocabulary, use of metaphors, wit and sarcasm, sense of humor, and on and on… I kept thinking, “Who talks/writes/thinks like this anymore?” In a world filled with “thx, u2, c u l8r’s, wat u doin?” etc., it was refreshing to hear his words and thoughts, some which made me laugh out loud, some which made me wince but always, they stimulated my mind.
To read a great review of the book by the NYTimes.
Some reviewers on Audible.com felt that Simon Prebble’s narration speed was too fast. I thought his pace was perfect and his reading flawless, however, I'd recommend listening to the sample to make sure you are comfortable with the reading. (I loved it)
Mr. Hitchens passed away in Dec. 2011. I regret not having discovered him decades ago so I could have enjoyed him while he was still alive but I am thankful that I stumbled upon his work and will certainly seek out more of his writing.
Like most people with busy lives that try to balance work, family, health, and as a writer, editing and writing, I don’t take spending 28 ½ hours on anything lightly, but I’d gladly spend 2600 hours listening to his work if it meant I’d be blessed with 1% of his mental ability.
I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys having their intellect not only stirred but also possibly shaken.
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- Darwin8u
- 07-10-15
No saints or sacred cows are safe from Hitch.
It is hard to not love Hitchens. Or hate him. God I miss him. He was one of those journalists and public intellectuals (yes, that is a tired phrase) that constantly made me feel I needed to up my game a bit. I would read a Hitchens article in Vanity Fair or Slate or about anywhere and realize that I hadn't read enough, thought enough, and certainly not crafted my thoughts well enough. Tail between my legs I would strive to do better. I didn't always agree with Hitchens, but reading him was like watching a master be masterly.
A lot of these essays I've read before on the internet or in some glossy magazine profile. I was always amazed at the voracity of his appetite. He consumed books. He fed on ideas. He was a humanist at the very highest level of human. I don't mean that to sound like I'm worshiping him or unglued. He had his faults. Many of them. But his biases and bigotries were informed by his love of people and ideas. Often those who thought they were on his side would find him pounding at their door asking for an explanation or exposing their hypocrisy. He would attack sacred cows (Mother Theresa ... see what I did there?), pull down idols (Bill Clinton) and defend his sacred (free speech, life, liberty) with the savagery of a wild beast. He reminded me of some weird love child of George Orwell (doesn't every English public school educated journalist want to BE George Orwell's love child?) and Graham Greene. He was Orwell in his defense of the defenseless. He was Greene in his need to get out into the mix, the mess of the word/world and figure this shit out. What does this mean? How does this work? Why is this happening? These are questions that left no one safe. Not even friends (Martin Amis). And GODS help his enemies (Insert religous dogmatist here).
Reading this selection of his later essays was like walking through a neighborhood I frequented a lot in my thirties. He was a major voice of my growing up. I would read Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan and wonder why we couldn't breed the same here in the US. I would watch him debate someone on YouTube and be amazed at how well he could do completely drunk. I miss the lush. I miss the brain. I miss Hitch.
The only issue I have with the audo version of this book is the production. There were just a couple gltches. The chapters on Isaac Newton and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall were braided together a bit. Other than that it was a near perfect read of a near perfect collection.
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- Ryan
- 04-29-14
Old school intellect for a new age
Whether you agree with his views or not, Christopher Hitchens was part of a breed that seems to be dying off in our dumbed-down era: the public intellectual. His essays express a formidable mind and a dry, pugnacious wit. Picture some suffer-no-fools British professor holding forth with a scotch glass in hand and you have a sense of Hitchens's style. To be sure, his opinions could be controversial -- he was outspokenly anti-religious, admired Karl Marx, and detested totalitarianism and Islamic extremism so vehemently that he broke ranks with fellow liberals who weren’t so enthusiastic about George W. Bush’s wars -- but there was refreshingly clarity and lack of dissembling to them. You could take issue with Hitch’s conclusions, but you could be certain that he wasn’t going to bow to religious orthodoxy, political correctness, or cultural double-standards. Any opponent being intellectually lazy would hear about it.
Hitchens was also very well-read, which means that about a third of the essays here, which discuss books (or some literary topic), are likely to delight some readers, but bore others. I admit that, as much as I admired Hitchens’s deftness at making connections to books and authors beyond the ones under discussion, I labored through this portion of Arguably. Still, even if my knowledge of the classics is skimpy, I found some of the biographical discussion of different writers interesting. I’ll have to check out Nabokov and W. Somerset Maugham.
However, my excitement picked up when the book got to the essays on history, culture, religion, and language. Hitchens knew how to poke apart a topic and get readers to look at it differently. Has Marx turned out to be right about capitalism, and did anyone ever really implement his ideas as he would have intended? Is the Kurdish region of Iraq a model for what the rest of that country might have been? Is Pakistan really America’s ally? What lessons do we really get from Harry Potter? His infamous Vanity Fair piece, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” is bound to rankle some readers, but many of them might not pick up on the real focus of his wit. And I had a good laugh during one of the latter essays, in which he examined the disingenuous use of the word “you” by advertisers and pamphleteers -- one of many moments when he got me to ponder something from an angle I hadn’t considered before. I even learned a few new words, such as “synecdoche”. (Yay, now I can see that Charlie Kaufman movie.)
All in all, a fine sampling of the contemplations of a strong, piquant mind, and one that had a faculty for language that the English-speaking world is rapidly losing. In an attention-deficit age in which youtube, buzzfeed, and “news” channels too moronic to call by name are supplanting the art of public disquisition, Arguably reminds us of the pleasures of that art and (arguably) its importance.
I forget what Hitchens actually sounded like, but audiobook narrator Simon Prebble is pretty effective at capturing the mannerisms I tended to imagine when reading some of these pieces in their original print form.
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