Book Review: 'A Hitch in Time,' by Christopher Hitchens - The New York Times - 0 views
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These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin).
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this miscellany ends in 2002. That was the year Hitchens, previously a self-described “extreme leftist,” came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He broke with The Nation, The London Review of Books and many of his old friends.
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Why care about a pile of old book reviews? Hitchens’s didn’t sound like other people’s. He had none of the form’s mannerisms. He rarely praised or blamed; instead, he made distinctions, and he piled up evidence
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For him, the books were occasions; he picked up the bits that interested him and ran with them. (“It’s a book review, not a bouillon cube,” as Nicholson Baker put it, replying to Ken Auletta, who had complained about one of Baker’s similarly rangy reviews in the Book Review.)
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Spying Henry Kissinger in the Sistine Chapel gawping at the Hell section of “The Last Judgment,” Vidal commented: “Look, he’s apartment hunting.”
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Hitchens was sui generis. He made most other book reviewers, to borrow Dorothy Parker’s words about the drama critic George Jean Nathan, “look as if they spelled out their reviews with alphabet blocks.”