Book Notes: Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

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It is, of course, nothing more than chance that the day after I finish Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22, I come across this statement on the Vanity Fair web site:

I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.

(The engagements he mentions refer to his book tour.)

Ah, Hitch, all that smoking and drinking is catching up to you. Let’s hope you win this battle.

But on to the book. If you don’t know Christopher Hitchens, he’s a polemicist, contrarian, journalist and defender of human rights. He’s been everywhere, from Cuba as a your revolutionary to Afghanistan as a reporter covering the recent war. He’s been to Iraq, both before and during the war, to India, covering the “case” of Mother Theresa, and to Bosnia as the hostilities started. He likes to claim that he’s the only writer to have been to all three countries that make up the “axis of evil”: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

This “memoir” is a loose collection of recollections and essays that give an overview of his life as a politically engaged journalist. Many people first heard about Hitchens a couple of years ago when his book God is Not Great was released. Hitchens went on a “crusade” to show how “religion poisons everything” and was involved in numerous debates (all polite and friendly) with religious figures around the US and UK. Unlike other “new atheists,” Hitchens is rather agressive in both his beliefs (or lack thereof) and his argumentation. He pulls no punches, and this can be seen in most of his writing, and in this memoir.

Hitchens has been scorned by the left for undergoing many changes in his political beliefs over the years, starting out as a Troskyist, and ending up, as he says in the last chapter of Hitch-22, a “skeptic,” far more willing to look at multiple ideas than to accept the tenets of a party or group. This has led him to famously support the Bush war in Iraq, though, as he points out in the book, he was for the war long before it became a war. Together with a small group of human rights activists, after seeing what Saddam Hussein’s regime was doing to Iraqis, he fought for regime change in Washington. His literary friends include Martin Amis, Ian McEwen, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, James Fenton and many others.

Hitchens was born in the UK but became American after 9/11, having lived in the US since the early 1980s. He writes for a number of magazines, having run the gauntlet of left-leaning (and leftist periodicals), long writing for The Nation, and now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Slate and other publications.

What impresses me most about Hitchens is the quality of his writing. He has acerbic wit, and his sentences sparkle. His arguments are very convincing (even if you don’t always agree with him, which can be difficult), and he pulls no punches. This memoir is 100% Hitchens: from the descriptions of his days in school to the present, he tells it like it is (or was), with a style that glitters.

I listened to the audiobook version of this work, read by Hitchens himself. While I wouldn’t classify this as an excellent reading – Hitchens takes commas for periods, and this makes the reading a bit fragmented – hearing him tell his story in his own voice was worth the price of admission.

If you want an interesting read about politics, growing up, literary circles, and plain old contrarianism, Hitch-22 is a great book. You may not agree with all of Hitchens’ opinions, but at least he’s committed to them and presents them without waffling. Would that we had more political journalists willing to write like Hitch.

There’s a very moving interview about the book, but where Hitch also discusses his cancer, death and mortality, from the Charlie Rose Show.

Take Control Books 50% Off Sale

Now through August 3, all Take Control books are 50% off (including mine). If you don’t know the great Take Control book series, it’s a set of ebooks about using the Mac and related software and hardware. Check out the sale now.

And if you’re interested, I’ve got a new Take Control book coming out at the end of August… I’ll be posting more here soon.

Kindle Prices Plummet

Amazon has introduced another new Kindle model, and this time the prices are starting to get low enough that this device may, indeed, become a commonplace appliance. The 3G version – which lets you get books almost anywhere, over the 3G network, is $189. But the real news is the wi-fi only model, which, for most people, is more than sufficient. Since Amazon has to pay for the 3G access, this allows them to offer a much cheaper wi-fi model: only $139. I’ll predict that there will be a $99 Kindle by Christmas, and the future of these devices will begin. At less than $100, people will easily buy ebook readers.

However, the iPad is still going to keep on selling like gangbusters, because of the many things it does. Will Apple release a smaller iPad designed more for ebook reading, at a lower price point? Time will tell.

Library of America Launches New Blog

I’m a big fan of the Library of America, a non-profit organization that publishes excellent volumes of works by America’s great authors. Just for the many volumes of Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William James alone, this would be a great enterprise. But they publish great authors from the founding fathers to contemporaries, such as Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth.

Their new blog, Reader’s Almanac, will feature posts related to the authors and volumes in their collection. I’m looking forward to their posts, as a way of learning more about the many great authors I’ve discovered as a subscriber to their series. (I have more than 100 volumes from the Library of America already.) If you are interested in American literature, you should check it out.

Books I Want: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve got lots of books; probably too many. But there are some books that I’d like to own, bu I simply cannot afford. My tastes are varied: from Stephen King to Henry David Thoreau, by way of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Robert B. Parker, Peter Robinson, Robertson Davies, William Shakespeare, and much more.

But one of my favorite authors is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was one of America’s finest thinkers, and reading his essays, lectures and journals is one of my favorite pleasures. I have a couple of editions of the journals: the recent two-volume Library of America selection; a 1909 ten-volume edition, which is a different selection from what, at the time, was a relatively un-scholarly edition, and a few paperback books that offer selections from the journals, both from early editions and from the 16-volume Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson published by Harvard University Press.

This scholarly edition, published between 1960 and 1982, is the ne plus ultra of Emerson journals. It is a true scholarly edition, with all changes, corrections, deletions and other details noted carefully. (You can see an example on Google Books.) They contain much more than just the journals themselves, but also contain the “Miscellaneous Notebooks,” which include drafts of Emerson’s lectures and essays.

In any case, I’m not planning to buy them soon, but found a complete set online from a German bookseller at a price well below list. Tempting, but it’s still way above my budget for now. But this is a series I’d like to get, and I may try looking for used copies of the individual volumes online.

New Kindle with Better Contrast: Third Time Lucky?

Amazon has announced a new version of its ebook reader, the Kindle, which touts, among other things, “50% better contrast” than the current models. I’ve written about my experience with the Kindle, which was a second-generation model, and which suffered from headache-inducingly poor contrast. Amazon has clearly had enough complaints about this issue – even if many people don’t find the contrast to be a problem – to come up with this new model.

However, at $379, this is only $120 less than an iPad, which does so much more. I’m convinced that the Kindle won’t last, unless it eventually ends up costing less than $100, or unless it’s given free with a certain number of book purchases. While it has some advantages over the iPad – better in-the-sun readability, lighter weight, longer battery life – the iPad clearly has a thousand other advantages. Amazon is fighting a tough battle, and competition is good for everyone. At least for those who buy Kindles, they’ll know they can read their books on other devices when the Kindle dies – Amazon has Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; for the Android phone; and for Macs and PCs.

Hear Me Discuss eBooks on the Tech Night Owl Live

On this week’s all-star episode, veteran Mac commentator Ted Landau explains why Apple hasn’t changed the basic look of new Macs in recent years.

Columnist Kirk McElhearn, a fan of mystery and science fiction novels, explains why he likes Apple’s iBooks ebook reading app and speculates about some of the issues involved in electronic publishing.

Macworld Senior Editor Dan Moren has examined Apple’s iOS 4 inside and out, and, along with his verdict on the new mobile OS, gives you some sage insights on some of the features Apple might improve in future versions.

NOW PLAYING! June 24, 2010 — Ted Landau, Kirk McElhearn and Dan Moren

Apple Updates iBooks E-reader App

With the release of iOS 4 yesterday – the latest version of Apple’s operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch – Apple has also released an update to the iBooks app for iPad, and a version of that app for the smaller iDevices.

While the addition of iBooks to the iPhone and iPod touch is important – it levels the playing field with the Kindle, which has apps for such devices – there are a couple of interesting features in the new version of this app.

Apple added some new display options: First, you can choose to have text displayed justified (aligned on both the left and right of the column) or not. (To change this, go to the Settings app, tap on iBooks and make your choice.)

Next, the Georgia font is now available (I still prefer Palatino; Georgia is too cramped). Finally, there is a “sepia” display option. I’ve never liked this in practice, though I like the idea. The principle is that the background is beige (something I see as I type this in BBEdit; I’ve long used beige backgrounds for my text editors and terminal apps), but the fonts are reddish-brown. If the fonts were black, I’d be all for it; there’s less contrast, and in low-light situations, it would be easier to read. But the lack of contrast between the font and the background makes it pretty hard to read, defeating any advantage you get by the softer background.

The biggest change, however, is one of syncing your current location as you read. When you close a book, your device sends the location to a server, and the next time you open the book – on the same device, or on a different one – iBooks checks to find all your books’ locations. This bookmarking was, of course, the way you kept your place on one device before, but now you can switch devices and keep your place (as long as you have network access when you close a book). This matches what Amazon offers with its Kindle app and device.

Finally, the iBookstore now more clearly shows you that you can re-download books you’ve already purchased. Before, you’d see, in the Purchases section, a list of books, but the links would suggest that you had to buy the books again if you wanted to re-download them. Now they are marked Redownload (if they’re not on your device). Again, this aligns with the Kindle, which manages your library on its servers; you can now easily get to all the books you’ve bought, even if you don’t save them on your computer in iTunes.

All in all, these are nice improvements for an app that’s already changing the market: both the Nook and Kindle announced lower prices yesterday, in part, I believed, because the iPad and now Apple’s other devices are providing stiff competition to them.