Hitch-22: A Memoir

From Barnes & Noble

Though now gravely ill, British-American intellectual Christopher Hitchens remains emphatically a party of one. How else can one describe a controversialist who has on occasion defended both Vladimir Lenin and George W. Bush, named as his favorite musicians J.S. Bach and Bob Dylan, and listed as his favorite occupation "traveling in contested territory." Not content with the battles still raging over his God Is Not Great, Hitchens wrote a robust, contentious, pointedly godless autobiography. Hitch 22 fully justifies the Times Literary Supplement description of him as "a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, an editor's dream." A Barnes & Noble Bestseller; now in paperback and NOOKbook.

The New Yorker

As contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author's incessant output, this memoir is an effective coming-of-age story, regardless of what one may think of the resulting adult . . . Hitchens paints a credible and even affecting self-portrait.

Bill Cusamano

The most erudite and astute political and social commentator of this era has written a memoir that not only give the reader a view of the man behind the words but also a perceptive look at society over the past decades. Hitchens fascinates with the life he has lived and observed and, as always, relates his story with precision and consideration.
— Nicola's Books

Drew Toal

Hitch is as Hitch does, and he's not apologizing to anyone.
— Time Out New York

Liz Smith

[H]e has so many great quotes and quotables . . . that one cannot read his latest masterpiece for having to stop, find a pencil and page stickers in order to underline and signify his many remarks, each greater than the other.
— wowOwow.com

Ed Luce

Few writers can match his cerebral pyrotechnics. Fewer still can emulate his punch as an intellectual character assassin. It is hard not to admire the sheer virtuosity of his prose ... With Hitchens one simply goes along for the ride. The destination hardly matters.
— The Financial Times

Mark Oppenheimer

[D]electable, sassy fun . . . this book is intelligent and humane . . . Hitch-22 reminded me why I love the author of The Missionary Position, his fervent slapping of Mother Teresa, and his book about the war crimes of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.
— The New Haven Review

Ariel Gonzales

After reading Hitch-22, the only thing you can be sure of is that this flawed knight will not breathe contentedly unless he has a dragon to slay.
— The Miami Herald

Diana McLellan

... a fat and juicy memoir of a fat and juicy life.
— The Washington Post

Alexandra Alter

... a complex portrait of a public intellectual.
— The Wall Street Journal

Jeff Simon

[An] extraordinary memoir by a truly astonishing figure of our literary age . . . This is among the most awaited books of the season, and while it confounds, misleads, exasperates and, on occasion, even bores, it also entertains to an almost shocking degree and illuminates almost as much. I laughed out loud - raucously and continuously - reading this book.
— Buffalo News

Dwight Garner

Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one's friends . . . I've ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens's personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.
— The New York Times

www.bookreporter.com

If you find yourself in the midst of Christopher Hitchens's memoir and he hasn't said something to anger, inspire, or at least annoy you, wait a few pages. More the account of an intellectual and political odyssey than a conventional autobiography, HITCH-22 chronicles the critic-journalist-activist's often storm-tossed journey across the ideological spectrum. What makes it a most rewarding trip is that he's a traveling companion with a vigorous mind and a gift for sparkling prose.

Kyle Smith

Whether he's dodging bullets in Sarajevo, dissing Bill Clinton, (with whom he says he shared a girlfriend at Oxford) or explaining his switch from leftist to Iraq war supporter, this foreign correspondent, pundit, and bon vivant makes for an enlightening companion. Give HITCH 22 an 11 out of 10 for smarts, then double it for entertainment value.
— People Magazine

Lee Seigel

a fascinating, absorbing book: the rare contemporary memoir that is the record of a life of true accomplishment and authentic adventure . . . Htitchens is bravely, or at least defiantly, candid about qualities his detractors might use to undermine or perhaps explain his love of war and his rabid hatred for religious people
— The New York Observer

The New Haven Advocate

[Hitchens] indulges in both an endearing critical self-examniation and an action-packed adventure story.

The New York Times Book Review

When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.

Gregg LaGambina

At its heart, Hitch-22 is a celebration of literature and a denunciation of idleness. Hitchens is inarguably a man of action: He pursues history as it happens . . . eloquent, enlightening, and entertaining.
— The Onion A.V. Club

The Sunday Oregonian

Hitchens expresses ambivalence about the term "public intellectual" but, as "Hitch-22" demonstrates, it suits him. The disputatious bon vivant is alive on the page, behind the speaker's podium and in unglamorous houses on off-peak cable TV.

Mark Rahner

Christopher Hitchens' memoir has the same nerve and frankness that first made me admire him . . . His perspective on becoming an American citizen is refreshing at a time when it's easy to become jaded about our role in the world.
— The Seattle Times

Douglas Brinkley

With the possible exception of Tom Wolfe and Maureen Dowd's, Christopher Hitchens' marvelous byline is the most archly kinetic in current-day American letters. Every article, review and essay has the romantic whiff of a durable vintage. You might disagree with him. You might question his motives. But not for a second will you ever be bored . . . goes on to call the memoir cunning, illuminating . . . Being able to shape-change, shed skins, sit on the hillside overlooking suburbia like a coyote, Hitchens represents a dying breed of public intellectual whose voice matters precisely because it can't be easily pigeonholed or ignored.
— The Los Angeles Times

Michael Washbum

One of the most engaging, exciting books I've read in years . . . The writing is lovely - introduction aside, which threatens early onset pretentia - Hitchens' cold-eyed evaluation of his younger self feels honest. To be sure, "Hitch 22" is often a chronicle of Hitchens' best efforts. He teaches us that cheap booze is false economy'' and reveals a youth engaged in boarding school homosexuality. But thankfully, Hitchens' efforts, friends, and close calls are rendered wonderfully in this strange book. Ultimately, "Hitch 22" is about cultivating and maintaining one's intellectual integrity. As Hitchens writes, [I]t is always how people think that counts for much more than what they think.''. . . But memoir generates pleasure through voice and sensibility, not through comprehensiveness. Nobody ever said self-awareness must lead to self-revelation, and even if you don't like what Hitchens thinks, it's easy to admire how he thinks.
— The Boston Globe

The Philadelphia City Paper

Hitchens offers up surprising revelations about the methods behind his madness as one of the world's most beloved and often hated scribes . . . bold and brassy Hitchens characteristically treats himself as the subject he knows best.

Michael C. Moynihan

Reading Hitch-22, his fascinating memoir of a career in combat journalism (both literal and figurative), one gets a sense that those looking for that tragic moment when a reliable man of the left became a fellow traveler of the right are asking the wrong question. On the big political issues that have long animated him-Middle Eastern politics, the dangers of religious messianism-his views have been surprisingly constant.
— Reason Magazine

Jennifer Senior

…marvelous in its own way. But it's probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead…Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it's touching, in Hitch-22, to see how often he'll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve. Which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he's so hard to dislike.
—The New York Times Book Review

Dwight Garner

Hitch-22 is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one's friends…I've ever read…It is packed with people—everyone from William Styron, Jessica Mitford and Isaiah Berlin to Nora Ephron, Keith McNally and Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom arrive attached to good anecdotes. A generous friend, Mr. Hitchens gives most of his book's good lines…to the people he loves. Those good lines including this one, from Clive James, who began a review of a Leonid Brezhnev memoir this way: "Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it…If it were read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky." Whatever the opposite of that book is, Mr. Hitchens has written it.
—The New York Times

AudioFile

"This superb young adult novel crosses into supernatural realms, and Jonathan Davis's performance offers its own kind of magic. Davis makes the transition from commonplace teen angst to paranormal regions naturally and believably. Carlos Ruiz Zafón's lyrical prose creates plausible characters and thrilling situations, all given substance by Davis's spot-on narration. A conversation with the author (who also composed and performed the incidental music) follows this engrossing tale."

AudioFile Magazine

"As narrator, he contributes a pleasantly moderated voice and a listener-friendly British accent."

Library Journal

Born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England, best-selling author Hitchens (contributing editor, Vanity Fair; God Is Not Great) was past 40 when he learned of his Jewish blood through his matrilineal line; his mother's secret, unknown to his father. After university, Hitchens started to write articles, leading to a four-decade career at well-known magazines. Add to that books, essays, and pamphlets all written with an unerring eye for issues that raised his ire or his support. Hitchens casts a cold eye on such notables as Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; puts under fire the Roman Catholic Church and the Vietnam War; and writes with affection about fellow literary peers. His coverage of Salman Rushdie's situation is an exercise in logic and idealism, while his views of British public education enlightens, as well as dismays. Of particular interest are his chapters on his mother and father, which are modestly deprecating and loving. VERDICT Not only is the writing original and flowing, but this memoir is brimming with political and cultural insights. A reader may disagree with Hitchens's take on the world, but his writing wins the day. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/10; 13-city tour.]—Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN

Kirkus Reviews

Hitchens (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, 2009, etc.) offers an engrossing account of his lives as a British Navy brat, a socialist activist and a leading essayist and intellectual of our time. Now in his early 60s, the author grew up a bookish, self-confident, lower-middle-class boy in the British provinces. He has few memories of his father, "The Commander," a taciturn career Navy man, but recalls with warmth and affection his mother, Yvonne, who shaped his childhood. Bright, pretty and unhappily married, she yearned for a life of smart friends and witty conversation-which Christopher would later lead-and often admonished, "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring." She committed suicide, apologizing in a note for leaving a mess ("Oh Mummy, so like you," writes Hitchens). She never mentioned her Jewish ancestry, which the author learned about later. In this frank, often wickedly funny account, Hitchens traces his evolution as a fiercely independent thinker and enemy of people who are convinced of their absolute certainty. He describes his budding socialist days at boarding school, where he helped create a student magazine ("Ink-stained pamphleteer! Very heaven!"); his '60s years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he protested the Vietnam War, debated at the Oxford Union and lost his virginity; and his subsequent life as a young journalist working for both mainstream and "agitational" papers in London. Writing at length about friendships with Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, he seems always to have another fascinating encounter-a visit with his near-blind literary hero Jorge Luis Borges, a melancholy lunch with Chester Kallman shortly after his partner W.H. Auden's death-lurking in the next paragraph or footnote. Hitchens also details the many controversies in which he has engaged since moving to the United States in the early '80s, including his defense of free expression in the Salman Rushdie affair and his support of the Iraq War. Once deemed a prodigious drinker, Hitchens notes that he now imbibes his Scotch whiskey carefully and produces more than 1,000 words per day. Revealing and riveting. There's little about his brother, his two marriages or his children, but other memoirs may follow. Agent: Steve Wasserman/Kneerim & Williams

The Barnes & Noble Review

For Americans of my generation -- the wrong side of thirty, but too young to remember the golden age of student protest -- the tales of youth offered by Christopher Hitchens in his new memoir may provoke somewhat more envy than we care to admit. A Trotskyite protester in Hitchens's salad days could enjoy the thrilling illusion that letter-writing campaigns and streetside invective might one day succeed in buckling the world order and building an epoch of peace on its ruins. Thirty years after Hitchens, if any of my college classmates were spending their off-hours atop milk-crates yelling into bullhorns, I am sure they were ignored. During the Hitchens era, these protests mattered. Now such protests as are held have the character of an elaborate costume party, with no more revolutionary commitment in evidence than at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Even if one's slogans would have been different, it is hard to beat away the feeling of having been born late.

Hitchens was born right on time, and if there had not been a booming protest movement waiting for him, he would surely have invented it. Hitch-22, Hitchens's first autobiography, follows him from his English boyhood and boarding school, to Oxford, and finally to the United States, but its core is his early years on the soapbox during his extraordinarily heady teens and twenties, a start that set him on the road of disputation and hack journalism that he has followed ever since. The narrative is loose, and recounts the stories of Hitchens's family, particularly his father Eric, a Royal Navy officer, and his mother, Yvonne, who committed suicide in Athens in Christopher's early adulthood, and of the author's time as a Washington journalist (identified first with the radical left and more recently with neoconservatism).

But the freshest moments are the oldest. Hitch-22 goes some distance toward answering the central mystery about Hitchens: how, over forty years of writing and constant on-air yakking, he has managed to continue to find issues that excite him, and that indeed regularly summon the intensity that a normal writer might reserve for only the most hotly contested elections, or perhaps a particularly recriminating suicide note. He is a man of uncommonly strong opinions about everything. The source of that energy appears to be in those radical student days, to which the most interesting portions of his memoir are devoted, and where he learned not only his ideology but the rhetorical techniques that provide his livelihood, and more. "I made a minor discovery," he says: "If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any sort of figure on a podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone." Those days appear, in his telling, to have been an atmosphere of intense and seductive confidence. We see the young Hitchens actively seeking out rivals to heckle in local political meetings, hunting for censored comrades to republish and distribute, and training in Cuba -- providing a glimpse of the future of that island when uttering counterrevolutionary thoughts of his own.

The mind on display in Hitch-22 is one that has never lost the atmosphere of confidence that buoyed his youth, and that seems to operate on the principle that the revolution is only one television appearance or street-corner harangue away. There is an addictive quality to this atmosphere, and Hitchens wants to breathe the air of no other. "To be enrolled in its ranks," he maintains even now, "is to be part of an alternative history as well as an alternative present and future"; "this 'movement' is everything." To keep the feeling of relevance and contrarianism he has had to ratchet the size and importance of his positions steadily up and to expand his cast of enemies (e.g., Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger) to the point where the only fight that would thrill him is one where he might get to catch the Almighty Himself on the hip, as he ultimately tried to do in god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Hitch-22 is a slighter but much more rewarding book than that earlier bestseller. (Pity about the silly and self-admiring title, referring to the supposed paradox of having to "combat the relativists and the absolutists at the same time." Only an absolutist would think this is a paradox.) It is the first of Hitchens's books that is not polemical, and perhaps for that reason also the most honest. Hitchens's previous books prosecuted their points with a tiresome insistence that somehow seemed incongruent to the humor he shows in his shorter work and to the indulgent and intemperate life he prides himself on living. In this volume there is no argument to prosecute, and the life is the story, so it can be lived openly.

The cast is studded with familiar names from London literary life in the 1970s, including the hypersexual Martin Amis (whose memoir Experience covers some of the same anecdotes), the brash genius Clive James, and James Fenton, the group's poet and oracle. I mention these three recurring players, but the names are dropped from a great height, and in huge quantities, like cluster bombs, throughout the book. 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. From the meals and binges of the principal cast, Hitchens extracts enough high-grade anecdotage to make this celebrity obsession tolerable. (If anything, these anecdotes, gossip, and witticisms that were the spoils of the politically engaged life are too much fun, and feel like they might have been not just sideshows to Hitchens's politics but ends in themselves.)

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.

--Graeme Wood