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Christopher Hitchens Book Reviews
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. In memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens says the combination of raging teenage hormones and an 'all-male school featuring communal showers, communal sleeping arragements, and communal lavatories. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. The memoir is partly diaristic and at intervals loops back to the writing desk at Ravello and to the present day. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity.
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.'
![Christopher Hitchens Memoir Christopher Hitchens Memoir](/uploads/1/1/8/3/118304804/842248878.jpg)
- 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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Christopher Hitchens Books Free Download
Author | Christopher Hitchens |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Autobiography |
Publisher | Twelve Books, Atlantic Books (UK) |
20 May 2010 (UK)June 2, 2011 | |
Media type | Hardcover, paperback, audiobook |
Pages | 448 (inc 24 pages of photographs) |
ISBN | 978-0-446-54033-9 |
OCLC | 464590644 |
920.073 | |
LC Class | CT275.H62575 A3 2010 |
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. The planned worldwide tour for the book was cut short later the same month during the American leg so that the author could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer.[1] Through the book's publisher and in the magazine for which he was a regular contributing editor, Vanity Fair, Hitchens announced: 'I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.'[2]
Description[edit]
![Christopher Hitchens Memoir Christopher Hitchens Memoir](/uploads/1/1/8/3/118304804/460104512.jpg)
Hitchens initially found the book hard to write: 'I found it fantastically difficult. Normally, when I'm writing, I'm making an argument, making a case. Also, when I'm writing, I'm trying to see how much I can pack into 5,000 words about a subject. But here's a subject I know too much about.' But he eventually produced a manuscript that was twice the length of the version finally published.[3]
Hitchens used his memoir to discuss several incidents that were later picked up by reviewers and the media as notable for their revelatory nature: as a contemporary at Oxford University of the then-student Bill Clinton (who later became the American President), he knew that Clinton's later avowal that 'I did not inhale' in regard to marijuana was based on Clinton's allergy to smoke; but Hitchens also states that Clinton's consumption was via 'cookies and brownies';[4] that during the writing of Martin Amis's novel, Money, Hitchens and Amis visited a New York brothel so that Amis could research the experience; [4] that during an encounter at a party with the then British Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, she proceeded to 'spank Hitchens directly on the buttocks' and call him a 'Naughty boy!'[4]
New foreword[edit]
The paperback edition of the book, published in 2011, featured a new foreword by Hitchens which mentions his newly diagnosed cancer: 'I suffer from Stage Four oesophageal cancer,' he writes. 'There is no Stage Five.' And 'I hope it will not seem presumptuous to assume that anybody likely to have got as far as acquiring this paperback edition of my memoir will know that it was written by someone who, without appreciating it at the time, had become seriously and perhaps mortally ill.. When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.'[5][6]
Critical reception[edit]
Comments from critic Dwight Garner's article in The New York Times Book Review are quoted on the back cover. 'Electric and electrifying.. He has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments with a flick of the wrist.'[7] and 'It is a fascinating, funny, sad, incisive, and serious narrative..' by Alexander Waugh of The Spectator.[8]
Hitchens died of esophageal cancer in 2011, aged 62. His autobiography received positive reviews, and some critics felt his prose was impressive and wit was incisive.
References[edit]
- ^Peters, Jeremy. 'Christopher Hitchens to Begin Cancer Treatment', The New York Times, 30 June 2010.
- ^Books (2010-07-01). 'Book tour halted, The Telegraph'. London: Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^Hillel Italie (2010-06-14). ''Christopher Hitchens On 'Hitch-22': Memoir Was 'Fantastically Difficult' To Write''. HuffPost. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^ abcPine, Gideon (2010-06-08). ''Hitch-22': 6 Juicy Celebrity Bites From Christopher Hitchens's New Memoir (PHOTOS, POLL)'. HuffPost. Retrieved 2020-06-22.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^'Book preview, foreword'. Barnesandnoble.com. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^Nicholas Lezard (2011-04-23). 'review'. London: Guardian. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^Garner, Dwight (2020-06-22). 'In Memoir, Christopher Hitchens Looks Back'. New York Times. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
- ^'Spectator review'. Spectator.co.uk. 2010-06-05. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved 2012-04-14.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
External links[edit]
- Book preview at Barnes & Noble
Christopher Hitchens Memorial
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