In Memoir, Christopher Hitchens Looks Back
By Dwight Garner
Published New York Times: June 1, 2010

HITCH-22
A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens
Illustrated. 435 pages. Twelve. $26.99.
(Allen & Unwin in NZ & Aust)

Christopher Hitchens was in boarding school and barely out of short pants when he first learned that “words could function as weapons.” He was small, bad at sports and got picked on. He worried he was becoming “a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag.” So one day he turned on a tormenter. “You,” the young Mr. Hitchens declared, “are a liar, a bully, a coward, and a thief.” His stunned tormentor slunk away.

Here was a Harry Potter moment — cue cello and then full orchestra — in which Mr. Hitchens, a presumed Muggle, the product of a staid middle-class British family, was revealed instead to be a kind of wizard. He would grow up, a process recounted in his electric and electrifying new memoir, “Hitch-22,” to confront wartier bullies. Here he is, later in the book, on Henry Kissinger: “liar, murderer, war criminal, pseudo-academic, bore.”

Mr. Hitchens soon learned a second cheerful lesson about the potent art of rhetoric. While studying at Oxford in the late 1960s (he was in the room on the famous night that Bill Clinton didn’t inhale), he discovered that “if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you never need dine or sleep alone.”

These twin discoveries — that words have moral force and that they can bring intense pleasure (not merely sexual but intellectual) — form the strains that underpin both Mr. Hitchens’s life and his high-spirited memoir.

“Hitch-22” traces Mr. Hitchens’s coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man, and charts the long and serrated arc of his thinking about politics, from his early days as a militant member of the International Socialists to his gradual drift toward positions, like his support for the Iraq War, that have made some on the left scratch their heads.
The full review at NYT.