'Christopher Hitchins was in boarding school and barely out of short pants when he first learned that “words could function as weapons.” He was small, bad at sports and got picked on. He worried he was becoming “a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag.” So one day he turned on a tormenter. “You,” the young Mr. Hitchens declared, “are a liar, a bully, a coward, and a thief.” His stunned tormentor slunk away.
Here was a Harry Potter moment — cue cello and then full orchestra — in which Mr. Hitchens, a presumed Muggle, the product of a staid middle-class British family, was revealed instead to be a kind of wizard. He would grow up, a process recounted in his electric and electrifying new memoir, “Hitch-22,” to confront wartier bullies. Here he is, later in the book, on Henry Kissinger: “liar, murderer, war criminal, pseudo-academic, bore.”
Mr. Hitchens soon learned a second cheerful lesson about the potent art of rhetoric. While studying at Oxford in the late 1960s (he was in the room on the famous night that Bill Clinton didn’t inhale), he discovered that “if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you never need dine or sleep alone.”'
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/books/02book.html?hpw
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
