God Is Not Great. Cristopher Hitchens

As I have mentioned previously I have never bothered much with Hitchens, no doubt due to his alignment with the neocons, nobody's perfect I guess, but having recently watched him present an argument defending freedom of speech and then listening debate "We'd be better off without Religion." alongside Richard Dawkins I must admit to being more than a little impressed.
So much so I placed my order for his new book this morning, unfortunately it will not be released here in the UK until June Eighth (Amazon) but available Stateside immediately (Amazon)
No doubt I shall be putting in my two bits worth once I have read it, but for the mean time:



From Booklist
*Starred Review* God is getting bad press lately. Sam Harris' The End of Faith(2005) and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006) have questioned the existence of any spiritual being and met with enormous success. Now, noted, often acerbic journalist Hitchens enters the fray. As his subtitle indicates, his premise is simple. Not only does religion poison everything, which he argues by explaining several ways in which religion is immoral, but the world would be better off without religion. Replace religious faith with inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas, he exhorts. Closely reading major religious texts, Hitchens points to numerous examples of atrocities and mayhem in them. Religious faith, he asserts, is both result and cause of dangerous sexual repression. What's more, it is grounded in nothing more than wish fulfillment. Hence, he believes that religion is man-made, and an ethical life can be lived without its stamp of approval. With such chapter titles as "Religion Kills" and "Is Religion Child Abuse?" Hitchens intends to provoke, but he is not mean-spirited and humorless. Indeed, he is effortlessly witty and entertaining as well as utterly rational. Believers will be disturbed and may even charge him with blasphemy (he questions not only the virgin birth but the very existence of Jesus), and he may not change many minds, but he offers the open-minded plenty to think about. June Sawyers