About this item
This groundbreaking collection of unpublished speeches by the late Christopher Hitchens--author of the #1 "New York Times "bestseller "god is not Great"--offers sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere. Christopher Hitchens was arguably the most erudite, provocative, and polarizing writers of the last twenty-five years. When he passed away in 2011 from esophageal cancer, writers, readers, pundits and critics the world over mourned his loss. Hitchens had a gift for lifting his audiences, both on the page and in lecture halls, by the passion of his voice, the moral urgency of his attacks, the bite and complexity of his wit, and the swagger and seeming spontaneity of his lyrical soliloquies. His now-legendary public lectures and debates cemented his status as the kind of literary phenomenon who comes along but once in a generation. No matter the subject, Hitchens's arguments each ultimately pointed to the same end: freedom from tyranny in any and all forms. "Why Religion Is Immoral "brings together the most memorable of the arguments he made over the last two decades, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; jabs at towering political figures like Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger; as well as celebrations of the pleasures of drinking, and of the writers whose lives and work most influenced his own, such as George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, among others.
About the Author
Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist and literary critic. He was a contributor to and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books - the most famous being - made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist. "The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face. " He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason.
