![]() ![]() ![]() Hitch-22 is a deeply personal account of Hitchens’ parents and his youth, alongside a charting of his political itinerary. His position assumes an ideal rationalist, on whose judgements of the world the lived experience of race, sexuality and gender has no bearing. But for Hitchens, personal politics is equivalent to the worst excesses of identity politics, which he derides. At the instant I heard this deadly expression I knew … that it was – cliché is arguably forgivable here – very bad news.” But what is the point of writing memoirs if the personal is irrelevant? We read Hitchens’ memoirs, as opposed to his essays, to better understand a man who opposed the first war on Iraq while barracking for the second. At one point in Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic Books, 352pp $35.00) Christopher Hitchens writes: “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 … people began to intone the words: ‘The personal is political’. ![]()
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