This groundbreaking collection of unpublished speeches by the late Christopher Hitchens—author of the #1 New York Times bestseller god is not Great—offers sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.

Christopher Hitchens was arguably the most erudite, provocative, and polarizing writers of the last twenty-five years. When he passed away in 2011 from esophageal cancer, writers, readers, pundits and critics the world over mourned his loss.

Hitchens had a gift for lifting his audiences, both on the page and in lecture halls, by the passion of his voice, the moral urgency of his attacks, the bite and complexity of his wit, and the swagger and seeming spontaneity of his lyrical soliloquies. His now-legendary public lectures and debates cemented his status as the kind of literary phenomenon who comes along but once in a generation.

No matter the subject, Hitchens’s arguments each ultimately pointed to the same end: freedom from tyranny in any and all forms. Why Religion Is Immoral brings together the most memorable of the arguments he made over the last two decades, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; jabs at towering political figures like Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger; as well as celebrations of the pleasures of drinking, and of the writers whose lives and work most influenced his own, such as George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, among others.

Christopher Hitchens - indimenticato autore di controversi saggi in cui ha applicato la sua vena di libero pensatore iconoclasta a personaggi come Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton e Lady Diana - propone in questo libro un'insolita analisi della figura di Madre Teresa di Calcutta, rafforzata dalle testimonianze affidabili e ben documentate di alcune ex infermiere della missionaria di origine albanese, nonché di un autorevole medico (Robin Fox, direttore di una delle più importanti riviste mediche del mondo, "The Lancet") che visitò una delle sue case di cura. Hitchens sottopone all'attenzione del lettore gli aspetti più contraddittori dell'attività della religiosa e mette in discussione, in maniera coraggiosa e politicamente scorretta, l'«etica della sofferenza» che ne è alla base.

These seminal, uncollected essays by the late Christopher Hitchens, author of the #1New York Times bestseller god is not Great, showcase the notorious contrarian’s genius for rhetoric, and offer sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.

Christopher Hitchens was arguably the most erudite, provocative, and polarizing writers of the last twenty-five years. When he passed away in 2011 from esophageal cancer, writers, readers, pundits, and critics around the world mourned his loss.

This collection of essays brings together some of the finest pieces Hitchens published over the last two decades for the first time in one book, addressing with characteristic wit and erudition the subjects he is best known for, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; indictments of towering political figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, and Henry Kissinger; and celebrations of the writers and thinkers whose work meant most to him, from Saul Bellow, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, to his dear friends Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, among others.

The author Hitch-22 describes his losing battle with esophageal cancer while writing columns for Vanity Fair on politics and culture and also describing his personal and philosophical view of life and death. 12,5000 first printing.

€ 14,30

Il celebre saggista statunitense ci propone un'insolita analisi della figura di Madre Teresa di Calcutta, rafforzata dalle testimonianze affidabili e ben documentate di alcune ex infermiere della missionaria di origine albanese, nonché di un autorevole medico. Hitchens sottopone all'attenzione del lettore gli aspetti più contraddittori dell'attività della religiosa e mette in discussione, in maniera coraggiosa e politicamente scorretta, l'etica della sofferenza che ne è alla base.

This groundbreaking volume,never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interiorlife of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century politicalthought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the elevensurviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among minersand itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrificdrama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold morecopies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personalentries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s owndecline as he battled tuberculosis.Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasureddispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds offamous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as theautobiography he would never write.

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.




Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.




MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.




Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.




MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation.

"A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English," said The Economist, "would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and Sir Tom Stoppard. Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall, and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful, too." Hitchens-who staunchly declines all offers of knighthood-hereby invites you to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. His knowledge is formidable, an encyclopedic treasure, and yet one has the feeling, reading him, of hearing a person thinking out loud, following the inexorable logic of his thought, wherever it might lead, unafraid to expose fraudulence, denounce injustice, and excoriate hypocrisy. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with something approaching awe at his felicity of language, the oxygen in every sentence, the enviable wit and his readiness, even eagerness, to fight a foe or mount the ramparts.

Here, he supplies fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan.

Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.

This groundbreaking volume,never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interiorlife of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century politicalthought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the elevensurviving diaries collected here record Orwell's youthful travels among minersand itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrificdrama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984 (which have now sold morecopies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personalentries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell's owndecline as he battled tuberculosis.Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasureddispatches, edited by the world's leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds offamous passages to come” (New Statesman) and amount to a volume as penetrating as theautobiography he would never write.

"Just as the necessary qualification for a good liar is a good memory, so the essential equipment of a would-be lie detector is a good timeline, and a decent archive."

In NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO, a New York Times bestseller, Christopher Hitchens casts an unflinching eye on the Clinton political machine and offers a searing indictment of a president who sought to hold power at any cost.

With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right, and he argues that the president's personal transgressions were ultimately inseparable from his political corruption.

Hitchens questions the president's refusals to deny accusations of rape by reputable women and lambasts, among numerous impostures, his insistence on playing the race card, the shortsightedness of his welfare bill, his ludicrous war on drugs, and his abandonment of homosexuals in the form of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Opportunistic statecraft, crony capitalism, "divide and rule" identity politics, and populist manipulations-these are perhaps Clinton's greatest and most enduring legacies.

"Just as the necessary qualification for a good liar is a good memory, so the essential equipment of a would-be lie detector is a good timeline, and a decent archive."

In NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO, a New York Times bestseller, Christopher Hitchens casts an unflinching eye on the Clinton political machine and offers a searing indictment of a president who sought to hold power at any cost.

With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right, and he argues that the president's personal transgressions were ultimately inseparable from his political corruption.

Hitchens questions the president's refusals to deny accusations of rape by reputable women and lambasts, among numerous impostures, his insistence on playing the race card, the shortsightedness of his welfare bill, his ludicrous war on drugs, and his abandonment of homosexuals in the form of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Opportunistic statecraft, crony capitalism, "divide and rule" identity politics, and populist manipulations-these are perhaps Clinton's greatest and most enduring legacies.

Un incontro-scontro fra due dei più brillanti oratori del nostro tempo sul ruolo della religione nella società globalizzata. Un "processo a Dio" che vede rispettivamente nelle vesti dell'accusa e in quelle della difesa due polemisti d'eccezione come Christopher Hitchens e Tony Blair. Il primo, implacabile e brillante accusatore delle follie e dei disvalori cui l'uomo si abbandona nel nome di una fede: oscurantismo, superstizione, intolleranza, senso di colpa, terrore verso la sessualità, anti-secolarismo. Il secondo, ex primo ministro britannico, convertito al cattolicesimo, è uno dei leader politici che più apertamente si sono dichiarati uomini di fede e si sono spesi per il dialogo interreligioso. Le domande sul banco dell'imputato sono spinose. Le religioni provocano gravi danni alla salute degli individui e delle nazioni o contribuiscono allo sviluppo delle civiltà? Fanno bene o male al mondo? Producono fanatismo? Fomentano ingenue credenze o aiutano a trovare il senso del proprio agire quotidiano? La fede in Dio è compatibile con la modernità? La religione si intromette troppo nella vita politica degli Stati? Un dibattito arguto e provocatorio, con più di un pizzico di humour, su un tema centrale nella riflessione contemporanea.

Questo libro è l'occasione per ripercorrere alcuni dei capitoli più intensi e decisivi della storia contemporanea, partendo dalle proteste degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, passando per la caduta del muro di Berlino e il crollo delle ideologie, per approdare agli scenari successivi all'11 settembre, quando Hitchens attaccò i terroristi islamici. Nemico giurato di ogni fondamentalismo religioso, Hitchens ha attraversato gli ultimi quarant'anni di storia delle idee a passo di carica, disseminando il suo percorso di critiche feroci a tutti gli ismi sopravvissuti all'èra delle ideologie, ma anche di saggi sul rapporto tra potere e religione, e sull'importanza fondamentale della critica e del dissenso. In questo memoir, che si affianca alle più celebri e classiche autobiografie anglosassoni, Hitchens si scopre non solo saggista, ma anche narratore di razza. Tra aneddoti e ritratti al vetriolo di celebri personalità del mondo politico e culturale, da Henry Kissinger a Madre Teresa, da Martin Amis a Noam Chomsky, l'autore riversa in questo libro una quantità di materiali, idee, storie personali e collettive che si incontra, forse, soltanto nei grandi romanzieri dell'Ottocento.