He declares his favourite word in the English language to be “library” and he has indeed read and remembers a very great deal. Hitchens is a vain man but he has much to be vain about: intelligence, wit, style, charm, a prodigious memory and a fluency in debate that brings packed houses to wherever he expounds his views. His musings on Islamophobia and the need for executive action against Saddam Hussein read too much like essays – until he tells the story of Mark Jennings Daily, a young Californian who went off to Iraq to fight, and die, for a war in which he believed because of Hitchens’s writings.īut there is far more in this engaging book than fury. The Rushdie fatwa brings out the combative best in his writing his call for “a bit of character and guts and integrity,” his willingness to put himself in the firing line, his lack of patience with anyone who doesn’t feel like joining him. He’s an ideologue, as full of passionate intensity when defending George Bush Jr as he was when attacking Richard Nixon.

On the contrary, it’s the absence of cynicism that’s so striking. But few traces of such opportunism are detectable in this memoir. His critics accuse him of being a professional controversialist, taking up positions merely in order to be given the opportunity to defend them in print and on television. In fact, he’s a born polemicist, only fully alive when marshalling all his forces to advance a particular cause. He thinks of himself as an ironist, permanently alert to the contradictions of the world, a master of negative capability. The portrait of Hitchens to emerge from this book, then, is at odds with his self-image. The Guardian (and a snarky interview with Hitch by Decca Aikenhead) Since the book came out in the UK on May 20, most of these are British: I thought I’d collect some of the major reviews (and excerpts) here if you want opinions before buying. In this respect he’s the Orwell of our generation. I’ll be buying it, simply because he’s always interesting and witty, even when he’s wrong. The reviews so far have been pretty positive. Christopher Hitchens’s “autobiography,” Hitch-22, is out in the U.S.

Hitchens memoir