1. Mailer pseudo-kerfuffle follows a pattern: there's a type of male writer who tends to be a star when alive & then goes into reputational decline soon after death: macho, two-fisted, sometimes substance abusing: Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Mailer, Harlan Ellison, Hitchens.
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5. Oddly, Hitchens' atheists polemics also seem time-bound: The Old Atheists (say Bertrand Russell) were philosophical & sturdy. The New Atheists were very much of a piece with era of post 9/11 Islamophobia & liberal worries about Bush's public piety.
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6. Hitchens was once a name to conjure with & his legacy is still unsettled. What is living and what is dead in his oeuvre?
@bellye66 & I sat down to talk some Hitchens:https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-what-happened-to-christopher?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email …Show this thread
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I read God Is Not Great as a teen and remember it well. In hindsight it’s unbelievably juvenile
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his Vanity Fair pieces were strong and have fared better with time
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Getting his balls waxed for journalism was a highlight, in retrospect
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I really enjoyed Letters to a Young Contrarian in college and now I wonder if it just made me insufferable :-/
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His literary criticism wasn't great and his post 9/11 foreign policy was bad. But I think he'll be remembered for his memoir (Hitch-22 is an account of a great Boomer life) and hit jobs--it's hard to dislike or forget anybody who decides to take Mother Teresa down a couple pegs
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And yeah, i recently reread this book and while it’s got it’s share of intellectual bullying (him on Tom Clancy isn’t a fair fight), it’s aged pretty well
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In my admittedly limited experience, Hitchens' reputation among The Youngs (to the extent he has one) rests almost entirely on GOD IS NOT GREAT. I've talked to ppl who were completely unaware of his political writing; they knew him solely as a public atheist.
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