Hitch-22: A Memoir
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Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.This is the story of his life, lived large. The Barnes & Noble Review Hitch-22 provoked in this reviewer several out-loud cackles, emitted more through the middle of the book than through its later American chapters, some of which bear evidence of having been scavenged from magazine work for Vanity Fair. And it made me wonder whether my generation, much more cynical about the power of student protest, didn't miss out on the first lumbering pulses of a great engine of inspiration that has apparently powered Hitchens for the last forty years, inspiring him never to say anything quietly when he could yell it out instead, nor to think anything that he could not also publish. The result has been a blessed existence in which he has found a paying audience for endless articles and television appearances, which are for him acts not of work but of leisure. Having so many strong opinions leads to having many wrong ones, of course, and the ambivalence about his adherence to the quasi-religion of Trotskyism is one that he would do well to resolve. In this volume he has mostly shown himself to be an incorrigible hedonist and an enviable wit. This is a good book, if not a serious one. Many memoirists, after all, show themselves to be much less.
Prologue with Premonitions 1Yvonne 9The Commander 32Fragments from an Education 47Cambridge 63The Sixties: Revolution in the Revolution 83Chris or Christopher? 93Havana versus Prague 110The Fenton Factor 127Martin 154Portugal to Poland 179A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American 204Changing Places 239Salman 261Mesopotamia from Both Sides 281Something of Myself 330Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question 353Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul) 385Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis? 402Acknowledgments 423Index 425
