Every once in awhile one's brain gets a kick-start and sometimes the resulting vibration opens a stubbornly closed door. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. The War Against Cliché is a motley heap of literary judgments that nevertheless offers us a peek at the evolution of Martin Amis.

Talk of Balkan atrocities in the 1990s wasn't exactly riveting for me -- and he's aware of a tendency to bore and addresses it, as he does all his potential faults, but still. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only believe nonsense, they can be saved. A Contrarian, as Hitchens knew, is someone who instinctively takes the opposite side in any debate, just for its own sake. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will suply plenty of time for silence.I am only recently acquainted with Hitchens' work, but I consider this to be a worthy starting point for anyone wishing to understand the essence of this most excellent specimen of man.

Meanwhile, serious political discussions have been replaced by quips, soundbites and witless point-scoring. However, in the interval between 1968 and 1989 - in other words, in that period where many of the revolutionaries against consumer capitalism metamorphosed into "civil society" human-rights activists - there were considerable interludes of stasis. It is a guide to how to challenge yourself and others to get to the nub of issues, written in the form of answering letters to an imaginary young reader who poses questions about how and why and when we should be 'Contrarian'. 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. I find this somewhat of a challenge to read (having a dictionary and the Google handy is helpful), and that it provides an non-trivial obstacle to understanding the author's points.

He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. To support the importance and relevance of these themes he packs the book to the gunwales with literary and commentary references which themselves stimulate an appetite for further reading. g. those fellow-travellers on the left who nevertheless subjected leftism to critique or even opposition: there’s a whole hidden list of distinguished names, from Andreu Nin to Victor Serge to C.

The 2005 edition of the book places this quotation, notably vested of its "At his best" qualification, on the cover.Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.

Bertrand Russell records in his autobiography that his Puritan grandmother "gave me a Bible with her favourite texts written on the fly-leaf. A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough.

This was in stark contrast to those Stalinists on the left like George Galloway who flocked to defend Saddam and might therefore be described as being Right but for the Wrong reasons. Aside from the advice on offer, the book also contains a good deal of recommended reading, some with which I was already familiar, but much that I was unaware of and look forward to reading. Hitchens exhibits precisely the combination of indignation and intellect that he recommends to others. At his best," he wrote, "Hitchens exhibits precisely the combination of indignation and intellect that he recommends to others.