Good advice for anyone living in, what Salman Rushdie calls “a world of timidity” where everyone is trying to be politically correct and where identities are constructed around one’s “offendedness”. Hitchens, in a long tradition of naysayers, dissenters, tell-it-as-it-is contrarians, points out that postulating a special connection between one group of people and their supposed intrinsic traits can run the risk of perpetuating received essentialist concepts of their culture, concepts, for instance, that postulate the existence of one unified cultural perspective, role, or principle.

Chapters in the book focus not so much on a comparison of different ideological perspectives as presented by representative writers as on the function of specific literatures in the symbolic perception of the contrarian and vice versa. Thus, his letters are not to be taken as a representation of total zeitgeisty realities but as a subject of interest that plays a part in and reflects a part of that zeitgeisty reality.

The fact that criticisms here seems to ignore non-mainstream attitudes seems meaningful, especially since the contribution of this book demonstrates very directly how important and diverse the representation of different moral courage, direct action, tenacity of one’s convictions, etc are incumbent in this day and age where ennui, insouciance and apathy reign supreme. Hitchens, for example, warned against becoming lackadaisical and lackeys and drew parallels between trees and people. He demonstrates that ideology and action can engage in productive dialogues as long as their semiosis are carefully grounded in specifics and not based on essentialized notions. Must read!