And Yet...: Essays / Christopher Hitchens

An Amazon Best Book of December 2015: What a tragic irony that in this era of surreptitious videotaping, political posturing and runaway media, we no longer have the brilliant Christopher Hitchens to decipher it all for us. The award-winning essayist (many say “polemicist” and mean it as a compliment) died of esophageal cancer in 2011. But if we can only speculate as to what Hitchens would have to say about the world in 2015, we at least can read these collected essays, some already published, some not – at his death, it is said that he left nearly 250,000 words of as-yet-unpublished essays. Whether old or new to us, the pieces collected here are funny and wry and searingly intelligent; not a single nuance or nanosecond of phoniness slips by “Hitch.” Whether analyzing the romanticization of revered Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara, or remarking that the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan is a “faux bonhomme,” Hitchens quietly astounds us still with his characteristic combination of erudition and commonality. Reading Hitchens was always a wry, witty pleasure; now that he’s gone, it’s more like having a wonderful dream, a nocturnal visit from a beloved, brilliant friend. --Sara Nelson