By that gesture, which made those bills a collectors’ item in some quarters of the left, he expressed an ambition to move beyond the money economy and what used to be termed “the cash nexus.” It was a stroke, at once Utopian and puritanical, that seemed to sum up his gift both for the improvised and the determined. This he did with a contemptuous flourish, scrawling the bold nom de guerre “Che” on both denominations. WHEN, SHORTLY AFTER the triumph of the Castro revolution, Ernesto Guevara took over the direction of the Cuban National Bank, it became his duty to sign the newly minted ten- and twenty-peso notes.
Review of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, by Jon Lee Anderson, and The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright With this posthumous volume, he remains, “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist” ( The Village Voice). Often prescient, always pugnacious, formidably learned, Hitchens was a polemicist for the ages. “Another great book of essays from a writer who we wish were still alive to produce more copy” ( National Review), And Yet… ranges from the literary to the political and is a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking “makeover.” The range and quality of Hitchens’s essays transcend the particular occasions for which they were originally written, yielding “a bounty of famous scalps, thunder-blasted targets, and a few love letters from the notorious provocateur-in-chief’s erudite and scathing assessments of American culture” ( Vanity Fair). His death in December 2011 from esophageal cancer prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary voices-writers, readers, pundits and critics the world over mourned his loss.Īt the time of his death, Hitchens left nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form.
The seminal, uncollected essays-lauded as “dazzling” ( The New York Times Book Review)-by the late Christopher Hitchens, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller God Is Not Great, showcase the notorious contrarian’s genius for rhetoric and his sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.įor more than forty years, Christopher Hitchens delivered essays to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic that were astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative.
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