The prolific polemicist Christopher Hitchens has let down his guard in his new memoir, said Decca Aitkenhead in the London Guardian. A few of his disclosures are deliberately provocative: He boasts in Hitch-22 that before he became known as a hard-drinking womanizer, he was enthusiastically bisexual, from his adolescent days at a British boarding school until his looks “declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.” But the book may shed even more light on his psyche than he intended. It’s meant to explain his progression from hero of the Left to fierce advocate of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but logic plays a surprisingly weak role. A few years ago, his second wife, Carol Blue, attributed Hitchens’ new enthusiasm for war to sheer machismo. “It has to be true,” he says now.
The great strength of the book, in fact, is that Hitchens seems to have realized that “his opinions are fueled more by his heart than by his head,” said Joan Bakewell in the London Times. At Oxford, he was a gifted student who at an early age forged tight friendships with other rising luminaries such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan. Haunting his life as a man of letters, though, were memories of his father, a British naval commander who used to speak constantly of fighting the Nazis as the high point of his life. Hitchens says he finally felt a similar rush of moral clarity on 9/11. “There is something exhilarating about that,” he says.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”