Reviews

NYT Gushes Over Hitchens' Memoir

Says Hitch-22 is “electric and electrifying.”

Try not to blush: The New York Times review of Christopher Hitchens’ new memoir is so favorable that it’s almost embarrassing. Dwight Garner calls Hitch-22 “electric and electrifying” and “among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one’s friends—Mr. Hitchens’s close ones include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton—I’ve ever read.” The book traces Hitchens’ “coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man,” and it Hitchens “is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes (though he has recently quit smoking) and long nights spent talking.” Garner ends with a quote from a Clive James’ book review that says, “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it,” and then he says that “Whatever the opposite of that book is, Mr. Hitchens has written it.”