From Booklist
Agree or disagree with polemicist Hitchens, there is no denying the clarity of his thinking, the depth of his reading, the thoroughness of his inquiries, the independence of his opinions, and the brio of his superbly fashioned prose. An expat Brit who has written for the Nation and Vanity Fair and authored a number of stinging books, Hitchens cannot abide fuzzy logic, cant, hypocrisy, or lies and has enraged the Right and the Left with his vehement criticism of religion and his thrashing of Michael Moore and Bill Clinton. Hitchens writes astutely about post-9/11 patriotism and war and about why history is no longer taught in American schools. But this daring political analyst is also passionate about literature and offers discerning interpretations of Proust, Huxley, and Bellow. And he even shares glimpses of his less toxic self, reading Kipling to Borges in Buenos Aires, and driving across southern Illinois in a red Corvette looking for sites commemorating Abraham Lincoln. Hitchens' compassion is as sure as his ire is hot, making for a bracing and provocative collection. Donna Seaman
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Book Description
"I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other 'profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." The Christopher Hitchens Reader showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The point of departure for this book is an antique saying: life is incomplete unless love, poverty, and war have been experienced. In his introduction, Hitchens, one of the most controversial intellectuals of our day, reflects on how he has been touched by these discrepant states.

FROM THE CRITICS

Colm Toibin - The New York Times

When he is not being mean and when he is not happy, he can write as well as George Orwell. His witnessing an execution by lethal injection of a man who was suffering from post-Vietnam stress disorder makes for a brilliant, chilling piece of work. ''The medical butchery of a helpless and demented loser, the descendant of slaves and a discarded former legionary of the Empire, made neither society nor any individual safer. It canceled no moral debt. It was a creepy, furtive and shameful affair, in which the participants could not decently show their faces or quite meet one another's eye.'' His essay on the nonteaching of history in the United States, where his own children cannot ''tell Thomas Jefferson from Thomas the Tank Engine,'' is also thoughtful and convincing.

Publishers Weekly

Branded an apostate by the left for his post-9/11 embrace of the U.S.'s war on terror, former Nation columnist Hitchens reprints some of the offending pieces, along with lighter fare. The title names the book's three sections. "Love" turns out to be "of literature"; displaying an eclectic range, Hitchens analyzes the new English translations of Marcel Proust as perceptively as he attacks Christopher Ricks's Dylan's Vision of Sin, among other works. When he shifts to "Poverty," Hitchens's caustic intolerance for the hypocrisy he sees in public figures comes to the fore. Some objects of his scorn are familiar-Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton-but he also finds new targets ranging from Martha Stewart to the Dalai Lama and Mel Gibson, with special opprobrium for Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is dubbed "a sinister exercise in moral frivolity." The "War" material more fully documents Hitchens's break with the left and finds him passionately arguing against citing U.S. foreign policy, past or present, to rationalize terrorism. In other essays throughout the collection, from a nostalgic account of a drive along historic Route 66 to fond memories of the WTC towers, readers may be surprised to see the master of cynicism engaging in open sentimentality. Even when Hitchens isn't quite what one anticipates, however, he's as sharp a writer as one has come to expect. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war." So begins the introduction to this latest book from contrarian Hitchens (A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq), which gathers a decade's worth of essays, articles, and columns from such magazines as the Nation and Vanity Fair. "Love," the book's opening section, contains essays on the beauty and timelessness of literature. Simultaneously critical and reverential, Hitchens speaks of many notable writers, including Byron, Joyce, Borges, and Huxley. In "Poverty," he reflects on his relationship to, and hatred of, the poverty of ideas and political hypocrisy found in the world, including terrorism, religious extremism, and capital punishment. "War" includes Hitchens's passionate and intense essays on the aftermath of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the conflicts in Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Kurdish Iraq. Whether writing about literature, religion, or foreign policy, Hitchens is not easily categorized as a predictable member of the Left or the Right, so his collection should appeal to all those who call themselves political junkies. Recommended for all public and academic libraries with journalism collections.-Katherine E. Merrill, SUNY at Geneseo Lib. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews