Daily Archives: March 18, 2026

With many thanks to Will, for a birthday present well chosen a few years ago here at the Gold Coast. A Book That Matters Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian — and some advice from 43 years of teaching P.H. Bloecker | bloeckerblog.com | March 2026   I am holding a slim volume in my hands — 141 pages, a red cover, a burnt-out cigarette stub on the front. A gift from William. The book is called Letters to a Young Contrarian. Its author is Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), one of the most brilliant, most combative, and most polarising public intellectuals the English-speaking world has produced. It was published in November 2001, weeks after the 11th of September — a moment when the world believed it had no use for contrarians, only for unity. Hitchens responded with a book that treats unity itself as a danger. The Book and Its Form Hitchens writes letters. Not to any particular person, but to a composite figure he assembled from his students — young people he taught at the New School in New York, who asked him: how do you bear being the one who stands alone? How do you go on thinking when everyone around you has stopped? The form is deliberate. It is modelled on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet — one of the most beautiful books about the inner formation…