(The exception is his relatively thoughtful chapter on the war in Iraq. Any number of historical moments - and famous names - parade before us without much context save for Hitchens's emotions about them.

This can be irritating, as one reads about the Prague Spring or the killing of Saddam Hussein as if they were stations in the eventful life of Christopher Hitchens. So visceral is his dislike that anything Clinton does - or fails to do - is used as proof that Clinton is beneath contempt.Ī further consequence of Hitchens's mingling of public moments with private rancour is that he often writes of global incidents (the brutality of Argentina's generals, the silencing of dissent in Cuba etc.) as if they were personal insults.

My point is, though, that there is no argumentĬhez Hitchens. To have, in his capacity as president, unequivocally backed Rushdie would have been for Clinton to put his personal views above his responsibility to represent a varied constituency. But Clinton had among his constituents any number of men and women who believed that Rushdie's He expresses his outrage at president Clinton's refusal to side unequivocally with Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini'sįatwah. Hitchens's dislikes make for vivid reading, but they also lead to dissonant moments. He can be casually nasty - as when he refers to Martin Buber as a 'pious old hypocrite,' seemingly because Buber had the gall to move into the house in Jerusalem that had belonged to the family of Hitchens's close friend Edward Said - or he can be more systematically mean-spirited, as he is whenever he refers to Bill Clinton, whom, evidently, he loathes. Hitchens is a man who has deep - often insufficiently explained - hatred for certain individuals. It also leads to one of Hitchens's failings here: an inability to appreciate that the personal and political are sometimes desirably kept apart. It's an apologia - a self-justification - as much as a memoir.

It is every bit as revealing as those memoirs, but it's a book that makes you want to argue with its subject rather than absorb - or contemplate - the lessons of the life lived.

It's just that these emotions are so weighed against his political thoughts and feelings that That's not to say he isn't forthcoming about his emotions or his friendships. Bush's war in Iraq than he is about his feelings for his wife and children. He is, for instance, more expansive and open about his support for George W. He's rather more concerned with the ideas that have driven that life (Marxism, socialism, justice, truth, the decline of the left) and the historical encounters and moments that have marked it. But it isn't quite that, since Christopher Hitchens isn't all that concerned with the day-to-day details of the life he has lived.

Hitch 22 a memoir