Christopher Hitchens

World-famous critic, columnist, and bad-boy intellectual Christopher Hitchens will be in town next week to discuss his most recent love sonnet to atheism, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Hitchens is a high-browed animal who defies easy classification—once a fixture of left-wing circles, over the past 30-odd years he’s taken up issues that confound liberals and conservatives alike, and in doing so reassured his committed fans that reason is the only deity he worships. Through columns in contrarian forums Slate.com and The Atlantic Monthly, the bow-tie wearing Weekly Standard and National Review, and just-plain-interesting Foreign Policy, Hitchens continues to thwart those who would marginalize him as a socialist, Leninist, capitalist, or neo-con. He was a bold supporter of toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 and generally supports confronting “Islamo-fascism” through an interventionist foreign policy; he also came out firmly against torture (he, himself, was water-boarded for a Vanity Fair article) and capital punishment. He blasted Sarah Palin for being an anti-intellectual and he ridiculed Obama for his profession of faith.
If you haven’t worked out an opinion on these issues, Hitchens can seem bellicose, condescending, and dismissive. But he also provides thoughtful, eloquent, and empirical arguments for his positions. And even if you have arrived at conclusions that agree in large part with his, the scorched-earth tactics he employs with non-believers, or those who simply reserve the right to say “I don’t know,” provide spectacle enough. Indeed, watching Hitchens debate recalls the feeling of witnessing a bar fight between two severely mismatched opponents: At first you might be giddy about the disparity, but the urge to intervene soon overwhelms you, no matter who, initially, was in the wrong. (Frank Carlson)