Saturday, June 26, 2010

NYRB on Hitchens

The New York Review of Books has a great review of Christopher Hitchens's new memoir.

The author actually represents my take on Hitchens pretty well. Lots of good to say about him. A little eccentric, a little too black-and-white sometimes, a little too willing to engage in his own brand of fundamentalism while legitimately criticizing that of others. I would only take issue with this review insofar as I think Hitchens has a point about the nature and importance of the threat of fundamentalist Islam to civilization. I would not follow Hitchens in extrapolating that insight into a justification for the Iraq war, but I do think the reviewer minimizes the importance and accuracy of that insight, and the clarity with which Hitchens has expressed it. Everything else here is quite good.

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