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Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author and journalist. Hitchens contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was the author of twelve books and five collections of essays, and concentrated on a range of subjects, including politics, literature and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, he excoriated such public figures as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, and Pope Benedict XVI. He was the older brother of author Peter Hitchens.
Initially describing himself as a socialist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks "exhilarated" him, strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face". His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he maintained that he was a Leftist.
A noted critic of religion and an antitheist, he said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in God were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." According to Hitchens, the concept of a God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. His anti-religion polemic, God Is Not Great, sold over 500,000 copies.
Hitchens died on 15 December 2011, from complications arising from oesophageal cancer, a disease that he acknowledged was likely due to his lifelong predilection for heavy smoking and drinking. His death prompted tributes and eulogies from a range of public figures, including Tony Blair, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Krauss, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Stephen Fry, Francis Collins and others.
His parents, Eric Ernest and Yvonne Jean (Hickman) Hitchens, met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His mother was a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service), and his father an officer aboard the cruiser HMS Jamaica, which helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape. His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.
Hitchens's mother, arguing "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it", sent him to Mount House School in Tavistock in Devon at the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and finally Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell. In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.
In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and oligarchy, including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He expressed affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he deplored the recreational drug use of the time, which he described as hedonistic.
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organisation was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".
Hitchens was married twice, first to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in a Greek Orthodox church in 1981; the couple had a son, Alexander, and a daughter, Sophia. They divorced in 1989. From February 1990, Hitchens' girlfriend was reported as being Carol Blue, a Californian screenwriter. In 1991 Hitchens married Blue in a ceremony held at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation. They had a daughter, Antonia.
Hitchens' brother, Peter Hitchens, posits that the brothers are only "1/32nd Jewish" by ancestry.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3956.Christopher_Hitchens |
Books
Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (read by Christopher Hitchens)
Christopher Hitchens - Mortality (read by Simon Prebble)
Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer (read by Nicholas Ball)
Christopher Hitchens - Hitch 22: Some Confessions And Contradictions: A Memoir (read by Christopher Hitchens)
Christopher Hitchens - Arguably: Essays By Christopher Hitchens (read by Simon Prebble)
Christopher Hitchens - Letters To A Young Contrarian (read by James Adams)
Christopher Hitchens - The Missionary Position (read by Simon Prebble)
Christopher Hitchens - Debates And Radio Appearances
Code:
Books
http://rapidgator.net/file/30ebd78d49a14275f9a9a7c17a1e4e9e/God_Is_Not_Great.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/ea612b439567e35448cd11fafb357dc6/Mortality.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5de32ea6d8a24f375f7297ecb652ecb7/The_Portable_Atheist.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/01b903bc41d9e40f0ada53f670ac983a/Hitch_22_A_Memoir.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/45e08b03513d4c46b2d07d5a47bfc9c3/Arguably.part1.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/0e0b91ffdf0a5649cfeb39943a0fb96b/Arguably.part2.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/992f4a72129275b30554530f5e999953/Arguably.part3.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/bdb1db3ad9326d8623e80c3b3a1af100/Letters_To_A_Young_Contrarian.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/4a045057d0a61dcb216ed6e668f9593e/The_Missionary_Position.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/d427a4bdcf83924a6fd98a9c550e8e14/Debates_And_Radio_Appearances.rar.html |
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