The cover of Christopher Hitchens’s latest book finds the author pictured, dapper in a rumpled olive trench coat and five o’clock shadow, brandishing a cigarette and gazing at us with obstinate skepticism. By posing as the craggy dissident, as if slumped in the corner of some dim café, the British-born journalist and author evidently seeks to cast himself as a morose rebel from the outset. The mission of Letters to a Young Contrarian, the latest addition to a career carved in stubborn public controversy, fits in nicely with this conceit: the seasoned revolutionary passes his wisdom onto flame-brained youth.

In a series modeled on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Alan Dershowitz has penned a Letters to a Young Lawyer) Hitchens dispenses advice on how to batter away at the prevailing hypocrisies of our day by living in a state—or rather, an activity—of principled opposition. Luckily, Hitchens has at least enough of a sense of humor to appreciate the condescending silliness that encircles this idea. “I myself hope to live long enough to graduate, from being a ‘bad boy’—which I once was—to becoming ‘a curmudgeon,’” he reflects, tongue firmly in cheek, after professing to be flattered and embarrassed by being deemed a role model.

Hitchens’s other books already walk the path of resistance, including diatribes against President Clinton (No One Left to Lie To, 1999), Mother Teresa (The Missionary Position, 1995) and, most recently, Henry Kissinger, whom he claimed should be indicted for war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Chile, to name but a few.

“Nobody asked me to do this and it would not be the same thing I do if they had asked me,” writes Hitchens in Letters of his life against the grain. “I can’t be fired any more than I can be promoted. I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed. If I am stupid or in poor form, nobody suffers but me. To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?”

Being an army of one in the war for truth can be hard when you’re cashing in a rumored $400,000 a year writing for glossy corporate rags like Vanity Fair alongside columns for more customary leftist vehicles like The Nation.

Or it can be very easy. It’s unfair to say that Hitchens is a total mercenary, or that he doesn’t live at least some of his principles—he takes care to remind you of all of his sundry sojourns alongside this political radical or championing that unpopular cause—but he undeniably benefits from the very best of the system he so deplores.

That criticism is part of what has occasionally garnered Hitchens the title of media whore, along with his recurrent television news panel appearances (surely the fastest way to earn the label). To his credit, nearly all of Hitchens’s contributions to public dialogue have been generally meaningful and unfailingly shrewd. One could argue, too, that his brand of rootless intellectual promiscuity embodies his professed ideal of nonconformity in refusing to stay within the traditional alignments of a man of the left: by giving favors to all, he pledges allegiance to none.

Besides, figures like him are amusing, and even useful, to have around to visibly puncture the sanctimonious grandstanding of public figures. During the Gulf War, in a live CNN appearance alongside Charlton Heston, Hitchens asked the actor and NRA president to identify the countries that bordered Iraq. Stumped after naming three, Heston complained that Hitchens was wasting the nation’s time by “giving a high school geography lesson.”

“Oh, keep your hairpiece on,” retorted Hitchens, according to Reason magazine.