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WillowOne's Positions

Hitch-22

Overview

Hitchens' memoir, published eighteen months before his death. It covers his mother Yvonne, whose suicide and secret Jewish ancestry he learned of late; his naval-officer father, "the Commander"; boarding school, Oxford and the Trotskyist left of the 1960s; his friendships with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and James Fenton; his move to America; and the break with much of the left over Bosnia, the Rushdie fatwa and the Iraq war, which he supported and defends at length here. The title's "22" is the catch of living with contradictions, and the book is in part an argument that one should.

Notes

Here for the man rather than the arguments. Hitchens was wrong about Iraq, and this book is the best case he could make and still does not persuade me, which is instructive: it is possible to be formidably well-read, honest and brave and still reason your way into a mistake because you have decided who your enemies are. The chapters on his mother and on learning, in his fifties, that he was Jewish by her line are the best writing he did. Read after God Is Not Great, not before.

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