Love, Poverty and War

'I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other "profession" that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.' Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases Hitchens' rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he was reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea or Cuba, or if his pen was targeted mercilessly at the likes of Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa ('a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud'), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson or Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the 1990s as a darling of the left, but he became more of an unaffiliated radical whose targets included those on the left who he accused of 'fudging' the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens showed in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays in this collection, he did not jump ship and join the right but was faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that always informed his work.