Arguably: Selected Essays (117 page)

BOOK: Arguably: Selected Essays

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32.
Review of
The Unbearable Saki
, by Sandie Byrne.

33.
Review of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
, by J. K. Rowling.

34.
Review of
A Savage War of Peace
:
Algeria 1954–1962
, by Alistair Horne.

35.
Review of
Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents
, by Robert Irwin.

36.
Review of
Orientalism
, by Edward Said.

37.
Review of
Freedom’s Battle
:
The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
, by Gary J. Bass.

38.
Review of
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
and
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
, by Victor Serge.

39.
Review of
Malraux: A Life
, by Olivier Todd.

40.
Review of
Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
, by Michael Scammell.

41.
Review of
Strange Times, My Dear
:
The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
, edited by Nahid Mozaffari.

42.
Review of
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
, by Martin Amis.

43.
Review of
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris
, by Ian Kershaw.

44.
Review of
The Lesser Evil: Diaries 1945–1959
, by Victor Klemperer.

45.
Review of
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War
, by Pat Buchanan.

46.
Review of
Human Smoke
, by Nicholson Baker.

47.
Review of
On the Natural History of Destruction
, by W. G. Sebald.

Acknowledgments

The thanking of friends and colleagues and co-conspirators ought to be the most enjoyable part of the completion of any work. However, the accumulation of decades of debt now forces a choice between the invidious and the ingratiating. To give their proper due to all whom I owe would now be impossible, resulting in one of those catalogs, so redolent of the name-drop and the back-scratch, that burden so many books these days. I am therefore restricting myself to those with whom work and life have become seamless: the close comrades who have become co-workers and vice versa.

In more than three decades of knowing Steve Wasserman, he has been my editor for publishing houses and for magazines, my closest reader, and now my agent. To have a literary intellect as my man of business is a privilege: Our work together has constituted truly unalienated labor.

It is twenty years since Graydon Carter asked me to join his enterprise at
Vanity Fair
, on the promise that I would try to find all topics interesting and, in return for much travel and instruction and variety, would agree to take on any subject. Managing only to exempt competitive sports, I have tried to be true to this. Every time an essay of mine has reached the office, it has passed through the meticulous care of Aimee Bell, Walter Owen, and Peter Devine, who conceive their task as putting the highest possible finish on my drafts. (In Aimee’s case, I have to call the attention “loving,” in the hope that she will notice, and perhaps blush.)

At the
Atlantic
, David Bradley, Benjamin Schwarz, and James Bennett give me the unique chance to take regular notice of serious new books, and a wide latitude in which to operate my choices. Again, and with further thanks to Yvonne Rolzhausen, there follows an effort to make the printed result the superior in tone of the original version.

It was a fair day that brought me close to Jake Weisberg, David Plotz, and June Thomas at
Slate
magazine, who suggested that the need to unburden a weekly polemic or
feuilleton
could be painlessly met by a column called “Fighting Words.” Can there be any writer in America who has had three regular outlets as perfectly synchronous and complementary as these?

This book is the third of mine to be brought to you by Twelve: a house that exists to disprove rumors and alarms about the continued combination of serious publishing with flair and panache. The devoted individual attention received by each author and text is rightly the subject of widespread admiration and envy. Cary Goldstein, Colin Shepherd, and Bob Castillo have wrought invisible but palpable improvements in everything I have ever brought them.

Over a rather grueling past twelve months, those mentioned above have also been invaluable in helping me to stay alive, and to give me—it’s not too much to say—persuasive reasons for doing so. This increases the bond, and makes it indissoluble. In that connection, while I cannot begin to thank everybody, I must mention Dr. Fred Smith of Bethesda, Maryland, Drs. James Cox and Jaffer Ajani of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (home of the world’s most emancipating form of radiation); and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health. Without the persuasive powers of my exceptional wife, Carol Blue, I might well not have had the fortitude or the patience to enter some of these treatments, or to persist with them. That recognition and acknowledgment lies somewhere beyond gratitude: Any surrender to fatalism or despair would have been as rank a betrayal of what I hope to stand for as any capitulation to magical or wishful schemes would have been. Then not lastly but at last to my tough, smart, brave, humorous children—Alexander, Sophia, and Antonia—who are a living marvel in themselves but who also represent all I can ever hope to claim by way of futurity.

About the Author

C
HRISTOPHER
H
ITCHENS
was born in 1949 in England and is a graduate of Balliol College at Oxford University. He is the father of three children and the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book,
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His bestselling memoir,
Hitch-22
, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he has also been the I.F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at
Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, New Statesman, World Affairs, Free Inquiry
, among other publications.