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

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Several brief correspondences with a hypothetical, representative student, whose responses are assumed, or left out, advise on what it is to be a contrarian. In fact I would go so far as to say that a refusal to read this book on personal grounds is as much a vindication of what it has to say as it is an objection to it.

The word hasn't completely lost this association even now, though it is less frequently used as an insult. Hitchens prompts this same thing in this wide-ranging, impeccably argued series of pseudo-epistolary treatises about what it means to be an independent thinker. Like Karl Marx’s famous Religion is the opium of the people statement (often assumed to have appeared in his Communist Manifesto, when it really appears in A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), Hitchens’ Antitheism remarks are very poorly understood and unjustly used to discredit him as a credible critic of religion.Epigrammatic, spunky, witty, in your face, timeless and timely, this book is everything you would expect from a mentoring contrarian.

Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books — the most famous being God Is Not Great — made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. I feel scarcely qualified to 'review' this work, I could only nod and marvel at the points he cited and made regarding the necessity of employing scepticism and doubt wherever applicable.We shouldn’t, I don’t think, desire suspension, or termination of the intellect, regardless of the ease it may bring us.