Book description
"I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there
was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist
because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information."
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases the Hitchens'
rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad
in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen
is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother
Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the
Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens
began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become
more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include
those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging"
the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and
Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary
criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped
ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist,
contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.
'Dazzling, and often very moving, writing from the 1990s by 'one of
the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time'
Observer 'An exceptional political polemicist' Prospect 'Hitchens is
just too damn good.' New Statesman
Christopher Hitchens
(1949-2011) was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist
for Slate. He was the author of numerous books, including works on
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Henry
Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international
bestseller and National Book Award nominee, god Is Not Great. His
memoir, Hitch-22, was nominated for the Orwell Prize and was a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
