Hitch-22: A Memoir pdf

He is a British-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, literary and religious critic, social critic and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of more than 30 books, including five collections of political, cultural, and literary essays. His polemical rhetoric made him a central topic of public discourse, resulting in him as an intellectual and controversial figure. Contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry, and Vanity Fair. Describing himself as a democratic socialist, Marxist and anti-totalitarian, he broke with the political left after describing it as the "lukewarm reaction" of the Western left to the debate over The Satanic Verses, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the anti-NATO war movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.

The last century. His support for the war on Iraq further separated him. His writings included criticism of public figures such as Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the older brother of conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens. He also called for the separation of church and state. As a critic of divinity, he regards notions of a deity or a higher power as universalistic beliefs that restrict individual freedom. He advocated freedom of expression and scientific discovery, and that it trumps religion as a moral code of conduct for human civilization. His famous statement, "What can be affirmed without evidence can be denied without evidence" became known as the Hitchens Code.

Hitch-22: A Memoir pdf by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens stands alone among 20th- and 21st-century pundits for his enthusiastic enmity and political flip-flopping, but while he makes no apologies for his beliefs, he does acknowledge their intrinsic contradictions. Critics praised Hitchens's frankness in sharing the details of his mother's suicide and of his breezy bisexuality, but they simultaneously balked at his decision to omit significant people and events (i.e., his wives, his children, and his role in Bill Clinton's impeachment). They also objected to his relentless name-dropping and some overly dense prose, and a few were appalled that Hitchens would continue to insist that Saddam Hussein did indeed possess WMDs. Despite these complaints, Hitch-22 is a sharp, rebellious, and sometimes bawdy account of the making of a modern mastermind.

Starred Review Hitchens, who, in his earlier books, has expressed contempt for both God and Mother Teresa (although not in that order), is often described as a contrarian. In fact, in his book Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001), he himself noted that he “can appear insufferable and annoying,” albeit without intending to. This memoir, bracing, droll, and very revealing, gives him yet another description: storyteller. He writes with a voice you can hear clearly, warmed by smoke and whiskey, and draws readers into his story, which proves as personal as it is political. As with many memoirs, it is not the public moments that are so fascinating, though there are plenty of those. Hitchens takes readers with him to Havana and Prague, Afghanistan and Iraq; tests himself by being waterboarded (he was disappointed in his early capitulation); and hobnobs with politicians and poets. He almost gets himself beaten up by defacing a poster in Iraq with a Hitler mustache. But the most intriguing stories are the personal ones, both from his early days, at home and at boarding school, and from his later life, when he learns that his mother was Jewish, which, if only technically, makes him Jewish as well. This revelation leads Hitchens on a quest to learn the story of his family, many of whom died in the Holocaust. How this new identity squares with his oft-proclaimed atheism sheds a different light on the meaning of religious identity. (He struggles mightily with his political identity as well.) Few authors can rile as easily as Hitchens does, but even his detractors might find it difficult to put down a book so witty, so piercing, so spoiling for a fight.