Beneath his hard-smoking, hard-discoursing veneer, Christopher Hitchens has always been a distinguished man of letters, the kind of writer whose ruthless journalistic crusades long for a place within the romantic history of dissent. That side of Hitchens is on display in Letters To A Young Contrarian, a how-to book that serves as a guide to the treacherous business of moral proselytizing. Part of a series inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet, the slim, 140-page volume is structured as a one-sided correspondence with a would-be dissident who's treated to a wealth of existence-justifying ammunition and loving readings of historical precursors such as Emile Zola, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph Heller. Hitchens attributes his support of opposition—manifested in a 30-plus-year career that includes recent tirades against Princess Diana and Mother Teresa—to his "conviction that human beings do not, in fact, desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind." In deftly argued, epigrammatic prose, Hitchens rails against his critics, religion, nationalism, and, most adamantly, the naively harmonious yearnings of the consensus, all of which come from a place "where the cerebral cortex has surrendered itself to dissipation." He shows a lot of heart too, maintaining that "to be in opposition is not to be a nihilist," and making sure his "dear reader" is equipped to endure the internal exile that accompanies the life of the political whistle-blower. In his regular columns for Vanity Fair and The Nation, and especially in his frequent TV appearances, Hitchens occasionally comes off as a reductive ideologue whose love of rhetorical bombast can overshadow his better-reasoned opinions. In Letters, he sticks to his guns, deflecting criticisms of narrow-mindedness with evidence of "how often certain 'complexities' are introduced as a means of obfuscation." It's hard to argue with many of his illustrations, including the distortion-exposing fact that, while everybody knows Princess Di once posed for a photo-op by a landmine field, almost nobody knows the name of Jody Williams, whose work on landmine bans won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. In a particularly enlightening passage, Hitchens urges his reader to take a cue from figures like Rosa Parks and Oscar Wilde, whose literal "as if" behavior ironically revealed the absurdity of their surroundings. Letters shows how Hitchens persists on an "as if" notion that argument is a healthy, rather than destructive, pillar of free society. It also offers a illuminating glimpse at an idea he revisits over and over: "The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks."