• "[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."
• “[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”
• “Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.”
British-born author, journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens died yesterday of oesophageal cancer, a disease that had also claimed his father’s life. Hitchens was 62.
Christopher Hitchens authored 11 books, co-authored 6 others, and also got 5 collections of literary essays published. His common targets were Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa. His books on George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were positive, thus less widely talked about. His most successful book is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a mocking comment on religion. His other books include:The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essaysand Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Christopher has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate and Free Inquiry.
Hitchens became popular particularly because of his persuasive essay, which he wrote with tremendous energy and venomous glee. He is also known for his lifelong passion with politics, with views that did not fit comfortably either with the conventional right or with the left. Hitchens was born in Portsmouth to parents of humble. His father was a naval commander whom he called “flinty and adamant”.
Hitchens loved and consumed alcohol and tobacco in heavy proportions. He smoked even on TV, at a time when smokers were scorned at. He consumed alcohol daily to an amount enough "to kill or stun the average mule". Despite this, he never missed deadlines or appointments. Regardless of condition, he is known to have always written fast and fluently. Journalist Lynn Barber called him "one of the greatest conversationalists of our age".
In 2010, during a promotional tour for his work Hitch-22, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. "In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be," he wrote, "I have abruptly become a finalist." Hitchens initially married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot. However, after their divorce he married Carol Blue, an American screenwriter. He has one son and two daughters.
Christopher Hitchens, journalist, born 13 April 1949; died 15 December 2011
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