Like many bright but impressionable youngsters I was greatly taken-in by the charisma and bravura bombast of the late Christopher Hitchens. In fact, I became a Hitchens groupie. I even own a t-shirt with his likeness on it. His was the first book on atheism I ever read, after losing my fragile faith watching Dawkins videos on YouTube. I purchased God is Not Great from the local bookstore to the visible dismay of the cashier, kept it in its paper bag on the car ride home, and then hid it under my bed until, on a day when my parents were out, I devoured it in a fit of scandalized glee.
Hitchens was cool and uncompromising, a debonair radical, equally likely to rouse you to righteous indignation with a blaze of rhetoric as to pitch you into elated laughter with some bawdy aside or flourish of scintillating wit. Provided you were on his side, of course. He retains that powerful charm in my memory despite the fact that Iâ??ve shifted against him on most matters that he cared about. This image (Hitch: the brilliant intellectual pugilist, suave, cerebral, and incendiary) I owe less to his writing than to his role as celebrity provocateur, which is best chronicled in the multitude of YouTube videos in which he stars.
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