“…Described as “a memoir,” this book is a full-frontal self-portrait, not an apologia; ….
… as the author would doubtless want us to note, “Never Apologize, Never Explain” was the title of Edmund Wilson’s 1944 New Yorker tribute to Evelyn Waugh.
By turns beguiling, annoying, fascinating and infuriating, Hitch-22 catches the tone, if not the totality, of the man.
We learn that the object of his earliest amorous attentions was a classmate named Guy, “a sort of strawberry blond, very slightly bow-legged, with a wicked smile that seemed to promise both innocence and experience.”
Later on, after his tastes turned more conventional, Hitchens allowed himself a “mildly enjoyable relapse” with “two young men who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government.”
Of his two wives, however, he says almost nothing.
Readers expecting a full account of our hero’s life and loves—or even of how he went about earning his trench coat—will be disappointed.
So too will anyone expecting the kind of tough-minded dissection Hitchens practiced with such panache …
… on the self-serving delusions of Henry Kissinger, Isaiah Berlin, Norman Podhoretz and Conor Cruise O’Brien…”
go to source/story>>>Changing Places | The Nation
