I’m a new member of the Christopher Hitchens fan club, a club I joined because I love his complicated but thoroughly enjoyable new memoir, Hitch 22 (Twelve, $26.99). A bon vivant whose polemics have often masked a deeply-felt and intensely thoughtful personal life, Hitchens is uncharacteristically reflective as he approaches 60. He was born into a family that functioned best in the company of guests or pets, and he was badly scarred by a mother who committed suicide. But, not surprisingly, the most interesting sections of this memoir revolve around the life of the mind; here’s Hitchens as a passionate young socialist who gave up any idea or plan for a “radiant future” to become the enemy of “absolute certainty.” That’s his Hitch-22--the need “to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side have unalterable convictions.”
