Letters To A Young Contrarian.

HITCHENS, Christopher.

Item Number: 14092

New York: Basic Books, 2001.

First edition. Octavo, original half cloth. Inscribed by Christopher Hitchens on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket.

"Do justice, and let the skies fall." Christopher Hitchens borrows from Roman antiquity this touchstone for a career of confrontation, argument, and troublemaking. Part of the Art of Mentoring series, Letters to a Young Contrarian is a trim volume of about two dozen letters to an imaginary student of controversy. The letters are wonderfully engaging--Hitchens is an exceptional prose stylist--and from the outset they strike a self-reflective note. What Hitchens lionizes and illuminates in this book is not any particular disagreement, but a way of being perpetually at odds with the mainstream. "Humanity is very much in debt to such people," he argues.