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

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Luckily, the likes of Joe Scarborough and Sean Hannity don’t get to determine the legacy of this man; at least not for anyone who knew him, or followed his work. In short, here's a guy who has seen more than you or your most well traveled friend ever will and has everything to say about it. Do bear in mind that the cynics have a point, of a sort, when they speak of the "professional nay-sayer".

It is curious to see how Hitchens ended up being with Harris, Dawkins and Dennett in one camp, at least in the public imagination. I wish I had read it at nineteen when it was released, but I'm still glad I got around to it at thirty. In this short work the author takes up the subject of what it means to devote oneself to a life of opposition to the status quo by responding to many of the questions he has received on the subject throughout the years.However, this was by no means the guaranteed outcome, and there must have been days when the "as if" style was exceedingly hard to keep up. the forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book. He understands the importance of disagreement-to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress-heck, to democracy itself.

He at times threated to lose his cool completely, sounding occasionally rather bloodthirsty and humourless. It is a strange thing, but it remains true that our language contains no proper word for your aspiration. Most of all, the Hitch reminds us here of the contradictory need for two habits of mind: irony/wit/laughter (contra the humourless ideologues who attempt to impose a Cyclopean monoculture upon us), and the willingness to do the unrewarded, at times plodding, even potentially monomaniacal work of "being boring," of championing a just cause even when it's apparently lost, for decades or a lifetime if need be.And these same people, who would not surrender the principles that attracted them to the struggle in the first place, were obliterated and defamed as mere posturing “individuals” who furthermore dared to oppose themselves to “history. The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one "race" to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination. 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. The “funny” thing is that the broadcast landed Wodehouse in an infinity of trouble with the British authorities, representing a nation that prides itself above all on a sense of humor.