Arguably - Introduction

[giselle]

yah, we have walmarts in Canada (aren't they everywhere?) - i order thru amazon but i'm not too impressed with their service so maybe i should switch .. ... in the case of nuke attack on the US, pretty good chance that long range missiles would fly over Canada ... a few might fall short and wipe out some wal-marts! guess the posties would be really busy doing change of address cards - I agree, this seems a pointless gesture, but then again what would be the point of doing something else?! lol

[Robert Tulip]

Having now reached page 180 of this wonderfully precise and evocative collection of jewels, I find myself in awe of Hitchens. Writers whom I have been too lazy and indifferent to read myself, such as Flaubert, Vidal and Dickens, I suddenly feel to be personal acquaintances after just a thousand words of essayed distillation through the wry and economical scalpel of Hitchens' pen. Festooned with grenades of eloquence and insight, Arguably is arguably brilliant.

With more than a hundred pieces to delight and inform, best get cracking. What I like about Hitchens is his ordinary modernity, saying things that relate to everyone, sympathetic to the popular but with an eye to the eternal, but far far better than anyone else could do. He will be sorely missed, but as he quotes Hume, non-existence after death is no more to be feared that the similar ages of nonentity before birth.

After cruelly drawing attention to his crass mistake about Tertullian on the very first page, I am yet to find another error beyond some accidental typos, and on every page you learn a lot of things you won’t want to forget. Maybe the Tertullian dating was deliberate, to put the reader on guard?

[DWill]

Hitchens is a fine lit man, as you say, and who can escape feeling envy at the range and depth of his reading? His journey is quite interesting, too, well illustrated in his bio, Hitch 22. We had some brief discussion on that book several months ago.