• Source: Arguably

      • Arguably: Essays is a 2011 book by Christopher Hitchens, comprising 107 essays on a variety of political and cultural topics. These essays were previously published in The Atlantic, City Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Newsweek, New Statesman, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. Arguably also includes introductions that Hitchens wrote for new editions of several classic texts, such as Animal Farm and Our Man in Havana. Critics' reviews of the collection were largely positive.


      Reception


      In a highly positive review, Fred Inglis of The Independent called Hitchens a "prose master" and lauded the author's skill as a polemicist, writing that various figures are "lined up, arraigned, swiftly appraised and, with a perfect and merciless justice, judged and sentenced." Inglis also praised the essays of literary criticism as "very well written, so funny and fluent, so loving and so pungent." In Kirkus Reviews it was written, "Sometimes his pieces concern passing matters, though they are seldom ephemeral themselves [...] Vintage Hitchens. Argumentative and sometimes just barely civil—another worthy collection from this most inquiring of inquirers."
      Charles Foran of The Globe and Mail lauded Arguably as "750 pages of bright, witty, nearly always charged reportage and argument", and wrote that the work "lays the foundation for Hitchens's enduring relevance as an essayist and commentator." Bill Keller of The New York Times called Hitchens "our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit", describing his range as "extraordinary, both in breadth and in altitude." Nicholas Shakespeare of The Daily Telegraph praised the book as "tremendous" and wrote, "I can’t think of anyone who brings to such a diverse range of subjects Hitchens’s mobilising wit, intelligence and passion."
      In the New Statesman, John Gray criticized Hitchens's views on 21st century terrorism and said the author sometimes "blanks out reality when it fails to accord with his faith", but nonetheless referred to Arguably as "the testament of a prodigiously gifted mind" and lauded him as "one of the greatest living writers of English prose", especially praising the essay "The Vietnam Syndrome". In a mixed review for The Observer, Finton O'Toole called Hitchens a "supremely evocative reporter" and "the most readable journalist of his time", but accused the journalist of "huge but unargued claims" and warned, "There are many sad moments when thought has withered into vacuity or bombast, moments in which we can see what Hitchens might have become – just another purveyor of American super-patriotic orthodoxies." O'Toole concluded that Hitchens "emerges here [...] as a great journalist fallen, for a while, among neocons."
      In 2016, James Ley of The Sydney Morning Herald listed Arguably among the collections from Hitchens that "[represent] the best of his work as a journalist, literary critic and cultural commentator."


      Awards and honors


      2011 New York Times Best Books of the Year
      2012 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, winner


      Books reviewed


      Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Allen
      Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, by Andrew Burstein
      Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, by Michael Oren
      Benjamin Franklin Unmasked, by Jerry Weinberger
      John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds
      Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame
      The Singular Mark Twain, by Fred Kaplan
      The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
      An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, by Robert Dallek
      Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March and Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog by Saul Bellow
      Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr.
      Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike
      A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts
      Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully
      Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
      Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke, edited by Frank W. Turner
      Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin
      Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert, translated from French by Mark Polizotti
      Charles Dickens by Michael Slater
      Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter, with a foreword by Francis Wheen
      Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol 1. 1885-1920, by A. David Moody
      Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, by Peter Y. Sussman
      Somerset Maugham: A Life, by Jeffrey Meyers
      Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum
      To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell
      John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, by Andrew Lownie
      The Life of Graham Greene, Vol II 1955-1991, by Norman Sherry
      Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite
      Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, by John Sutherland
      C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and the World Revolution, by Farrukh Dhondy
      The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
      The Unbearable Saki, by Sandie Byrne
      Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling
      A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne
      Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, by Robert Irwin
      Orientalism, by Edward Said
      Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, by Gary J. Bass
      The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge
      Malraux: A Life, by Olivier Todd
      Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell
      Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Antholody of Contemporary Iranian Literature, edited by Nahid Mozzaffari
      Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis
      Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, by Ian Kershaw
      The Lesser Evil: Diaries 1945-1959, by Victor Klemperer
      Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, by Pat Buchanan
      Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker
      On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald


      Book introductions


      Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West
      Animal Farm, by George Orwell
      Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene
      The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende


      References

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