'Public intellectual' Christopher Hitchens offers up a anecdote-packed memoir in which the disputatious bon vivant is less interested in incidents than in arguments. In his remarkable book Mortality, Christopher Hitchens wrote a dispassionate, clear, frightening and inspiring account of his decline toward death from esophageal cancer. His writing brings the reader into his hotel room when he was first struck down. Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. The book was published in May 2010 by Atlantic Books in the UK and June 2011 by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA, and was later nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
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This week saw the publication of Hitch-22, a memoir by essayist Christopher Hitchens. Known for his erudition, his militant atheism, and his unsparing critiques of the figures and ideas that others hold dear, Hitchens is admired and feared in equal measure on both the left and the right. Critics have found Hitch-22 both absorbing and, at times, frustrating--not unlike the man himself.
- Could Have Been More IntrospectiveThe Economist laments Hitchens's failure to examine his personal life more closely. 'For what is meant to be a no-holds-barred memoir, the author goes lightly on some of his failings. Broken ideals get plenty of self-satisfied scrutiny; broken hearts and marriages rate barely a mention. The impression left is of a writer frozen in a precocious teenagery, whose ability to tease and provoke the grown-ups is entertaining but ultimately tiresome. If Mr Hitchens can stay off the booze and do some serious thinking, his real autobiography, in 20 years’ time or so, should be a corker.'
- Reads Like a Who's Who At the Barnes & Noble Review, Graeme Wood adds up the name-dropping: 'I picked a random ten-page section and found sixteen luminaries referenced, from Nelson Mandela to Jorge Luis Borges, called in by Hitchens to raise the narrative's celebrity quotient.' Nonetheless, Wood admits that the memoir 'provoked in this reviewer several out-loud cackles,' and concludes that Hitch-22 'is a good book, if not a serious one. Many memoirists, after all, show themselves to be much less.'
- Lay Off the False Modesty! Salon's Allen Barra rolls his eyes at Hitchens's tic of self-deprecation, which to Barra rings hollow. At one point, Hitchens draws a parallel between himself and William Butler Yeats. As Barra tells it: 'Hitchens adroitly dismisses 'any comparison between myself and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century' -- except, of course, to point it out to us.'
- You've Changed, Man 'There is much in the book to enjoy,' writes Terry Eagleton at the New Statesman, but first you have to see past Hitchens's propensity for self-regard. Eagleton praises Hitchens as 'a superb writer, superior in wit and elegance to his hero George Orwell, and an unstanchably eloquent speaker.' Yet if the memoir proves anything, says Eagleton, it's that Hitchens may have grown too enamored of the jet-setting lifestyle: 'In his younger days, he was not averse to dining with repulsive fat cats while giving them a piece of his political mind. Nowadays, one imagines, he just dines with repulsive fat cats.'
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