It may sound morbid, but I wanted to read this book before Christopher Hitchens dies.
Sadly. as Hitchens acknowledges in the introduction, his demise is likely to come sooner rather than later. He is undergoing chemotherapy for oesophageal cancer and the odds of making a recovery are not good.
Anyone thinking that this serious condition might make him reassess his rejection of belief in the afterlife or what he calls the “sinister fairy tales of Christianity” should think again. His illness has actually made him more determined to reaffirm his position: “The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason”.
This book confirms Hitchens as a high profile intellectual who revels in the chance of a good argument which is for him, far preferable to boredom, in the same way that hostility is preferable to indifference . This explains why he declares that his ideal place to live is “in a state of conflict or in a conflicted state”.
If you read this book, as I did, hoping to learn more about the man behind the public profile, you will be disappointed. This is a memoir rather than an autobiography so we read of events, people and places that have influenced him but find out very little about his private life. Continue reading
