Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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Our remaining expressions - "maverick", "loose cannon", "rebel", "angry young man", "gadfly" - are all slightly affectionate and diminutive and are, perhaps for that reason, somewhat condescending. H]e makes entertaining mincemeat of self-satisfied politicians and shreds received ideas and media-spun consensus with a fearlessness that is invaluable in our mealymouthed punditocracy.

His take on the large movements of history over the 20th century infuse his accounts of his life with an honesty that most other theorists lack. This slim volume is a series of letters to aspiring radicals, which is to say, people wishing to emulate Hitchens’ philosophy. The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination. In an age of overly polite debate bending over backward to reach a happy consensus within an increasingly centrist political dialogue, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast. I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist.

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'. I myself hope to live long enough to graduate from being a "bad boy" - which I once was - to becoming "a curmudgeon". I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. James, representing a lost generation of people whose dissent and resistance was largely conducted within, and even against, the “Left” as it was generally understood.

I wish to learn the pressure points of conventional wisdom, so that I might subdue those who advocate it using only a bottle of absinthe and my thumbs. One of my reading friends here on Goodreads has a book shelf that she has labeled "top-notch insight. A short, powerful book which simultaneously challenges us to question orthodoxies, and gives us the tools and encouragement to do so.

I was particularly taken by the self-reflective and often humble tone of the book, as well as the beautiful simplicity and inescapable logic of the advice Hitchens offers on the subject of moral compromise and the temptation to “go along to get along”. Bertrand Russell records in his autobiography that his Puritan grandmother "gave me a Bible with her favourite texts written on the fly-leaf. As such, the book lends itself well to anyone in such a position, be they a supporter of his views or not. Nobody's going to agree with him 100%- I don't, and I'm one of his biggest fans- but what you take away from his work and this book in particular is a challenge.

Who better to speak to that person who finds him or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in profound and entertaining ways. Eigentlich lese ich nicht sehr gerne english, aber der Schreibstil war so direkt und nicht-hochtrabent und lebendig, dass das kein Problem war. At around the same time, and alarmed in a different way by many of the same things (the morbid relationship of the cold war to the nuclear arms race), Professor EP Thompson proposed that we live "as if" a free and independent Europe already existed. Anyone familiar with his work could see that while Hitchens certainly enjoyed a good debate, and would instinctively rally to unpopular causes, this was no mere pose, and he really did believe in what he was saying.Let this be a voice in the back of your head whenever you, or someone else, describes someone, (or himself) first and foremost in terms of ‘racial identity’, or when ‘identity politics’ is brought up. This book explores the entire range of "contrary positions"-from noble dissident to gratuitous pain in the butt.