Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

By: Christopher Hitchens

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 28 hrs and 22 mins

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."

©2011 Christopher Hitchens (P)2011 Hachette Audio

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.

What a loss

If you could sum up Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens in three words, what would they be?

A fantastic set of essays, brilliantly delivered

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I openly wept at the end- to realize the world's loss of this intellect

As American as Apple Pie

No book has challenged and amused me as much as this brilliant collection of over a hundred Christopher Hitchens' essays.

Before buying this book, I was not a big fan. I realize now, regrettably, that I just wasn't paying attention all those years he was around, at least not to anything other than his atheism and what I thought was his supercilious air on a couple of TV programs I cruised by on my remote.

I have discovered a gold mine, it seems to me, of Hitchens' hyper-intelligent, mordant wit and his textbook knowledge of such a vast array of topics [see below]. While his lexicon was wide and deep, he wrote in risible, rhythmic sentences that ebbed and flowed while he whaled on hypocrisy or satirized politicians or essayed on annoyances, affinities and amusements.

To give just a couple of examples, in his piece, "As American as Apple Pie," published in the July 2006 Vanity Fair, he noted of a certain American affinity, "The crucial word [...] doesn't come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was (a) a part of the gay underworld and (b) possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was "below-job" (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic "going down"). This term from London's whoredom still has a faint whiff of contempt.

... Stay with me. I've been doing the hard thinking for you. the three-letter "job," with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American.... Certainly by the time of the war in Vietnam, the war-correspondent David Leitch recorded reporters swapping notes: "When you get to Da Nang ask for Mickey Mouth..."

Another piece, in which he wrote of his disappointment with Vidal Gore's rapid post-9/11 disintegration entitled "Vidal Loco," (Vanity Fair, Feb. 2010), he quipped, "Vidal in his decline has fans like David Letterman's, who laugh in all the wrong places lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time."

After I bought this audiobook, and started listening, I was so fascinated, so amused and stimulated that I immediately bought the e-book as well. I find I can read or listen to these essays over and over, and laugh at something anew on each subsequent revisit.

It's broken into the following sections:

All American (20 essays on things like "Jefferson versus the Muslim Pirates," to "Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita" and "Mark Twain: American Radical.")

Eclectic Affinities (27 essays on topics like, "The Dark Side of Dickens," "W. Somerset Maugham: Poor Old Willie," "Graham Greene: I'll Be Damned," and "Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived.")

Amusements, Annoyances and Disappointments (8 essays such as "Stieg Larsson: The Author Who Played with Fire," "As American as Apple Pie," and "So Many Men's Rooms, So Little Time" (see Sen. Larry Craig))

Offshore Accounts (25 with titles like, "North Korea: A Nation of Racist Dwarves," and "Worse than Nineteen Eighty-Four")

Legacies of Totalitarianism (11 essays from "Isabel Allende: Chile Redux" to "W.G. Sebald: Requiem for Germany")

and,

Words' Worth (16 essays, such as "When the King Saved God" (on King James I's translation of the Bible) and "The You Decade" [Slate, Apr. 2007] and "A Very, Very Dirty Word").

Simon Prebble does an excellent job portraying the rapid-fire witticisms, the legerity and the incandescence of the late, great Christopher Hitchens.

"Arguably" is the cynosure of all essay collections: 28 1/2 hours; 107 Hitchens' polymorphous essays. I cannot commend it highly enough. You won't regret the purchase.

Left Us Too Soon

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I regret I did not discover the author until after his death from cancer. (Sixty?) Yes, 90% of reviews given audible are four or five stars, but with the exception of one, maybe two white elephants, all the essays here ring true. A blessed alternative to the dog-eat-dog world view published by so many non-fiction writers.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens?

Picking a favourite would be like picking a fav from among your children.

Have you listened to any of Simon Prebble’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This is only the second yarn I've heard read by this narrator.

Any additional comments?

I intend to listen to all of Hitchen's works.

Hitch is the greatest.

The man is missed and irreplaceable. This huge collection of his work is just damn great.

Brilliant and fearless

The underlying essays were in themselves fearless and engaging at a very human and intellectual level. I enjoyed all of them, though some more than others, and felt this was certainly a good use of my time brain and heart. Also a great teacher, that left me with a reading list thatI will never finish

Would be 5 stars if it was narrated by Hitchens.

The narrator was good but I miss Hitchens articulate voice. With a wide array of subject matter, this book is a great listen if you don't know what to listen to next!

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.

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.

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.