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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1493

Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 2010. Twelve. 435 pages. June 2010. hardcover. 9780446540339.

9780446540339 DESCRIPTION - #1 New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Christopher Hitchens—one of the most admired and controversial public intellectuals of our time—shares his personal life story. Most who have observed Christopher Hitchens over the years would agree that he possesses a ferocious intellect and is unafraid to tackle the most contentious subjects. Now 60, English-born and American by adoption; all atheist and partly Jewish; bohemian (even listing ‘drinking’ along with ‘disputation’ as ‘hobbies’ in Who’s Who) he has held to a consistent thread of principle whether opposing war in Vietnam or supporting intervention in Iraq. As a foreign correspondent in some of the world’s nastiest places, a lecturer and teacher and an esteemed literary critic, Hitchens manifests a style that is at once ironic, witty, and tough-minded. A legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for literature, he has sometimes ridiculed those who claim that the personal is political, though he has often seemed to illustrate that very idea. Readers will find that his own many opposites attract, as do his many sketches of friendship and ex-friendship, from Martin Amis to Noam Chomsky. Condemned to be able to see both sides of any argument, Christopher Hitchens has contradictions that contain their own multitudes.

Hitchens Christopher CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London’s Daily Express, Harper’s, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1868

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory & Practice by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 1995. Verso. 98 pages. hardcover. 1859849296. Jacket design by The Senate.

1859849296 DESCRIPTION - Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the House of Windsor, and eulogized throughout the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta has entered that most select of sanctums: the house of living saints. But, as Christopher Hitchens argues, all is not as it seems in the canonization of Saint Teresa. In a searching examination of the Teresa cult, Hitchens recasts our relationship with Mother. He recounts her cosy relations with unsavoury oligarchies throughout the Third World, from the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti to Union Carbide in India. He reports on her consistent mission to the rich, including corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. He spotlights her role as a propagandist for the most extreme views on abortion and contraception, details her dubious ‘special relationship’ with claims of miraculous and supernatural apparitions, exposes her authoritarian rule over her acolytes, and outlines her megalomaniacal plans to found a new religious order, The Missionary Multinational. Hitchens's concludes that, far from being heaven's agent on Earth, Mother Teresa is one of hell's angels.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1558

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 2001. Verso. 159 pages. hardcover. 1859846319. Jacket photograph by Christian Witkin.

1859846319 DESCRIPTION - With the detention of Augusto Pinochet, and intense international pressure for the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the possibility of international law acting against tyrants around the world is emerging as a reality. Yet, as Christopher Hitchens demonstrates in this compact, incendiary book, the West need not look far to find suitable candidates for the dock. The United States is home to an individual whose record of war crimes bears comparison with the worst dictators of recent history. Please stand, ex-Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Henry A. Kissinger. Weighing the evidence with judicial care, and developing his case with scrupulous parsing of the written record, Hitchens takes the floor as prosecuting counsel. He investigates, in turn, Kissinger's involvement in the war in Indochina, mass murder in Bangladesh, planned assassinations in Santiago, Nicosia and Washington DC, and genocide in East Timor. Drawing on first-hand testimony, previously unpublished documentation, and broad sweeps through material released under the Freedom of Information Act, he mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1439

Thomas Paine’s RIGHTS OF MAN: A Biography by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 2006. Atlantic Monthly Press. 158 pages. hardcover. 9780871139559. Jacket photograph by Christian Witkin. hardcover.

9780871139559 DESCRIPTION - Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, Paine’s text is a passionate defense of man’s inalienable rights. Since its publication, RIGHTS OF MAN has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted. But in THOMAS PAINE’S RIGHTS OF MAN, the polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens, ‘at his characteristically incisive best,’ marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness (The Times, London). Hitchens is a political descendant of the great pamphleteer, ‘a Tom Paine for our troubled times.’ (The Independent, London) In this ‘engaging account of Paine’s life and times [that is] well worth reading’ he demonstrates how Paine’s book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States, and how, ‘in a time when both rights and reason are under attack,’ Thomas Paine’s life and writing ‘will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.’ (New Statesman).

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1475

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 2001. Verso. 1859847862. 358 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: random.

1859847862 DESCRIPTION - What passes for political discussion in conventional circles rarely runs the gamut, even from A to B. To probe the deeper meanings of power requires inquiry beyond the vapidity of would-be Presidents, in Britain as well as the US. Fiction has traditionally been an alternative container for such ideas, sometimes a soapbox, sometimes a sanctuary, but always available and frequently used. Many have seen the meeting between literature and politics as necessarily fraught. Norman Podhoretz examined the intersection under the rubric ‘The Bloody Crossroads’. Christopher Hitchens, in this sparkling engagement with novels and their authors, pursues a different approach. Taking inspiration from Shelley's description of the poet as an ‘unacknowledged legislator’, he shows that while the encounter between writers and those in power is not always smooth, it generally embodies a dialectic that is well worth pursuit. Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist, so effectively deployed with the publication of the best-selling No One Left to Lie To, are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists. Here Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal's encounters with American revolution are scrutinized in interview; George Orwell's role as a fulcrum between left and right is carefully weighed; an appraisal of the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie becomes a meditation on the West's misunderstood encounter with Islam; Ernest Hemingway is defended against the vagaries of fashion; and Hitchens's delicious literary taste skips along a line from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, through Philip Larkin and Patrick O'Brian, to Walter Mosley,Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1415

The Lion & The Unicorn: Socialism & The English Genius by George Orwell. London. 1941. Secker & Warburg. 127 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Zec.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

This original book is a study of England and of England’s special problems in an age when private capitalism is dissolving into a classless, ownerless society. Cutting across the ordinary classifications, it insists that England, like all great countries, has its own peculiar destiny, and that the imitation of foreign political methods and habits of thought has been a disastrous error. Against the conventional patriots it urges the impossibility of winning the war without far-reaching social reconstruction; against the conventional left-wingers it urges the uselessness of aiming at any version of Socialism that does not take account of English history and character, it sets out, in its own words, to reconcile patriotism with intelligence. The first part of the book is a study of the social atmosphere of England and an attempt to determine just how much reality, and how much humbug, British democracy contains. The second part emphasizes the disastrous effects of social injustice on a nation engaged in total war. The third part sets forth a simple concrete policy of a kind that the English people might be induced to follow. This is a book for those who are neither ashamed of being Englishmen nor satisfied with England as it now is.

Orwell George AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GEORGE ORWELL was born in 1903 into an Anglo-Indian family and has had a varied history. He was a scholar of Eton, served five years in the Imperial Police in Burma, has been a dishwasher, a schoolmaster and a bookseller’s assistant, and fought and was wounded In the Spanish Civil War. Best known among his books is THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, with its unforgettable picture of the coalmining industry and the miseries of the Northern slums. Less widely read, but equally worthy of attention, are HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, one of the best of the Spanish war books, and BURMESE DAYS, one of the few outstanding novels of Anglo-Indian life. Rejected by the Army on medical grounds, George Orwell became a film critic, book-reviewer and sergeant in the Home Guard.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1607

Run With The Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. New York. 1993. Harper Collins. 497 pages. May 1993. hardcover. 0060169117. Cover design by Louise Fili. Jacket photograph by John Montfort. hardcover.

0060169117 DESCRIPTION - For five decades, Charles Bukowski’s writing has depicted life on the edge with an unflinchingly mordant clarity that has earned him millions of devotees all over the world. Here is the first comprehensive collection of the best of Bukowski’s autobiographical stories, novels, and poems, and it brings into razor-sharp focus the counterculture idol’s astonishing life and work. Bukowski’s crisp, gritty, highly personal writing chronicles his spectacularly extreme life, with its mingling strings of odd jobs, unusual women, inspired debauches, matter-of-fact desperation, and literary triumphs. RUN WITH THE HUNTED weaves these strings together in a manner that is as appropriate for Bukowski’s work as it is unusual for an anthology. It is arranged chronologically, not by its contents’ original publication dates but by the period in Bukowski’s life that each entry covers. As such, it transcends the realm of anthology and becomes something very like Bukowski’s memoir. Beginning with his first recollection of consciousness (as a toddler under a table in 1922) and culminating with wry septuagenarian reflections, RUN WITH THE HUNTED is packed with dispassionately eloquent accounts of his hard life - from brutal childhood to reluctant stardom - and crystalline observations of life at large. Compiled by John Martin, Bukowski’s longtime friend and editor, this landmark volume distills the essence of a prodigious life’s work and offers a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience. An internationally famous figure in poetry and prose.

Bukowski Charles CHARLES BUKOWSKI was born in Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived for many years in San Pedro, Callfornia. He published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He has now written over forty-five books of poetry and prose, as well as the screenplay of the film Barfly.

Martin John

JOHN MARTIN started Black Sparrow Press in 1966 specifically to publish Charles Bukowski’s work. Since then, Black Sparrow has published approximately five hundred books of poetry and prose by a wide variety of authors.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1401

Crabwalk by Gunter Grass. New York. 2002. Harcourt. Translated From The German by Krishna Winston. 234 pages. 0151007640. hardcover.

0151007640 DESCRIPTION - GUNTER GRASS has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now, but no book since THE TIN DRUM has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. ‘Scuttling backward to move forward,’ CRABWALK is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.

Grass Gunter Günter Wilhelm Grass (16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). At age 17, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history"

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1487

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. New York. 2009. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Newly Translated From The German by Breon Mitchell. 582 pages. Jacket art by Gunter Grass. Jacket design by Michaela Sullivan. 9780151014163. October 2009. hardcover.

9780151014163 DESCRIPTION - THE TIN DRUM, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass’s publishers all over the world, is bringing out a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: from a wealth of detailed scholarship; from a wide range of newly-available reference works; and from the author himself. The result is a translation that is more faithful to Grass’s style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After fifty years, THE TIN DRUM has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass’s amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar’s midget friends - Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews - waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.

Breon Mitchell is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he is also Director of the Lilly Library. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Oxford University. His areas of specialization include literary translation, Anglo-German literary relations, literature and the visual arts, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 1571

The Box: Tales From The Darkroom by Günter Grass. New York/Boston. 2010. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 194 pages. hardcover. 9780547245034. Jacket design & illustration by Patrick Barry. Translated from the German by Krishna Winston.

9780547245034 DESCRIPTION - ‘Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters—four, five, six, eight in number—and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk. .’ In an audacious literary experiment, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory—they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass’s assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? Recalling J. M. Coetzee’s SUMMERTIME and Umberto Eco’s The MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, THE BOX is an inspired and daring work of fiction. In its candor, wit, and earthiness, it is Grass at his best.

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Favorites

Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory & Practice by Christopher Hitchens

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

Thomas Paine’s RIGHTS OF MAN: A Biography by Christopher Hitchens

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers In The Public Sphere by Christopher Hitchens

The Lion & The Unicorn: Socialism & The English Genius by George Orwell

Run With The Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski

Crabwalk by Gunter Grass

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

The Box: Tales From the Darkroom by Günter Grass

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