Hitch-22 - 9780446540339

"Christopher Hitchens is a remarkable commentator. He jousts with fraudulence of every stripe and always wins. I regret he has only one life, one mind, and one reputation to put at the service of my country." Joseph Heller

"If you are invited to debate...with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words...would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy." Richard Dawkins

"Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language." Christopher Buckley

"If Hitchens didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to invent him." Ian McEwan

"He is a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, an editor's dream." Times Literary Supplement

"Christopher Hitchens is America's foremost rhetorical pugilist." Village Voice

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most noticed and debated public intellectuals of our time. Despite decades on the public stage, he has rarely written of the private dimensions of his life---until now.

Hitch-22 is the candid, personal history of a complicated man: English-born and American by adoption, all atheist and partly Jewish, stalwartly bohemian (proudly flaunting "drinking" along with "disputation" as "hobbies" in Who's Who), and rigorously intellectual. Here he discusses his famously unbending convictions, tracing the thread of principle that connects his opposition to war in Vietnam and his support for intervention in Iraq. He comments on the roots of his ironic, witty, and toughminded style---honed through stints as a foreign correspondent in some of the world's nastiest places, as a lecturer and teacher, and as an esteemed literary critic. Readers will find that his opposites attract, as do his many sketches of friendship and ex-friendship with notables from Martin Amis to Noam Chomsky. Condemned to be able to see both sides of any argument, Christopher Hitchens has contradictions that contain their own multitudes.

In a mode that is anything but shy, he tells of his complex and warm relationship with his late mother (whose Jewish heritage he discovered only after her suicide), his formative experiences as a socialist and activist, and the authors who shaped his intellect (from Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse, to Karl Marx and Richard Llewelyn). With no shortage of asides---involving persons as diverse as Ted Hughes, Jorge Borges, and Margaret Thatcher (whom he memorably described as "sexy")---he relates a transatlantic journey of artistry, productivity, and fierce conviction: a portrait of a personal life lived in a very public way. In this fashion, HITCH-22 throws into high relief the calamities, contradictions, and curiosities of being Hitch.