Christopher Hitchens Recommended Books

"Can greatly enrich our understanding of how [the author] transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author]'s neglected masterpiece novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Could make you laugh out loud." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Could make you] weep." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The Great English Novel of the 1980s." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Influenced me enormously when I first found it in a public library in Devonshire in 1967." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Was, and still is, considered more or less the book to beat." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A well-controlled masterpiece of frigid outrage at America’s betrayal of a loyal citizen." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The best document] in human history that [is] the product of a committee." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Great attendant volume." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Possibly the most penetrating of his many books about Saddam and Saddamism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A study of the relations between literature, sexuality, and power under Muslim theocracy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Brilliant." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"An essential complement to their predecessors." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] masterpiece." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Suggests that in several ways [cricket] is not really a 'sport' at all, but more of a classical art form." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] monumental work." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the finest autobiographies of that same century." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The most witty and penetrating first-hand account of [1970s Belfast]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"When I myself first read [this book], the phrase of hers that most arrested me was the one with which she described her father's hometown." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Returns often to the suicide of Cesare Pavese, who took his own life at the apparent height of his powers." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"At the age of twelve I had summoned the nerve to borrow from the headmaster, and to read [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Emboldened by the sheer bulk of the thing, I swerved into [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Leaves an ineradicable 'scratch on the mind.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The transition to me between reading 'books for boys' and 'adult reading' was [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A life-changing book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I was re-reading [this book] for what felt like (and quite possibly was) the third time in a month." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I couldn’t sleep for two nights after first reading [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A revisionist history of the First World War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I became consumed with the subject [of World War I] and got hold of [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"An anti-war British novel of the trenches." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"We were all expected to read Animal Farm and [this book], which had been placed on the syllabus as part of the curriculum of the Cold War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I was fairly soon immersed in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Excellent." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Excellent." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Have somehow made all this mania and ritual appear 'normal,' even praiseworthy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"How can I forget the moment when [I] learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language—always the language—was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry?" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author was] more celebrated still for [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Still a potent and eloquent reminder of a braver time." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Astonishing trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] path-breaking anatomy of the Ba'ath regime." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"About the Saddam tyranny and the wars and famines and plagues it had sponsored." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"About being a shambolic conscript in some forgotten cookhouse in the wartime British Army." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the best pieces of closely marshaled evidence and reasoning ever to emerge from the wonk-world." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

Christopher Hitchens mentioned Shakespeare's work in the "Hitch-22" book. (Source)

"[The author's] first collection of published poems." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] imposing collection of essays." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I winced with recognition when I first read the expression 'British teeth' in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"You might think that the contempt shown by the reporters for both their subjects and their readers is overdone, but you would be wrong." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A huge critical and commercial grand slam." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author] was perhaps not such a fool when he wrote in [this book] that all conceptions are immaculate." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I was able to return [Martin Amis] the favor in a way which was to help change his life in turn, by pressing on him a copy [of this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] complex, majestic, rhythmical twelve-volume novel sequence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The book of still another friend, [the author]’s ultrahomosexual effort." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Shortly after I arrived in New York, [this author] claimed to have diagnosed the same syndrome in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The acronym 'WASP' was] first minted by [this author in this book], the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[In this book, the author] says that most of his friends and colleagues have never even visited Washington except to protest." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Had spoken to my depths because it understood that the treason at midnight in 1947, and the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan, was a tragedy for the English too." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Anatomizes] the heap of madnesses and contradictions that went to make up the nightmarish state of Pakistan." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"About a voyage to revolutionary Nicaragua." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A book that made one think." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"It was with [the author's] much lesser effort, [this book], that I began to realize that there was an apparently narrow but very deep difference between us." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"At [the author's] request I even wrote an uninspired introduction to [this book], but my heart was not quite in it." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Recorded a meeting of like-minded members of Parliament the day after the fatwah." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Wrote that] men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Made a beautiful corkscrew or double-helix-shaped aphorism about the Hays Office." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The main character] manages to lay so many women that, afterward, even the females who didn’t receive his attentions prefer to claim, rather than appear to have been overlooked, that they were included, too." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Captain Frederick Wentworth in [this book], is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] masterpiece." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Illustrates [Wroclaw's] eminence as a hub of Bohemian and Prussian life as well as the epicenter of the Silesian question." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The best history of the German-Jewish relationship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Combats the wretched image of European Jews as fatalistic and passive." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[In this book], my father appears under the name (no first or 'Christian' name) of Lieutenant Hale." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[A] meditation on death." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"While recently rereading [this book], I was struck all over again by the breathtakingly observant operations of [the author's] eye and brain." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Astonishing (and astonishingly authorized) biography." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the great tragicomic novels of our day." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A welcome wake-up call." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author] essentially recast his friend Thomas Carlyle’s pessimistic version of the French Revolution in fictional form in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Deserves] reprinting in any anthology of the prose of the 20th century." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[This story] was so good, and [it] seemed so much to know what I might be thinking myself, that I was almost afraid to read on." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Somewhat too romantic an account of the rebels fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Evokes [the author's] homeland's natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] most imposing work is probably [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] best-ever essay." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Epic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Was the first and in many ways the most penetrating critique." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"There is a horrid fascination in reading this day-by-day chronicle as it unfolds." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"As its title implies, [this book] is more prepared to call things by their unambiguous names." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Actually a very moving and despairing assault on biblical literalism and servile human credulity." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] 1939 classic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[I] re-read it in one session, marveling again at how fine it is." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] book about the 'first' Gulf War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The most powerful of [the author's] plays." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"In [this book], one can often detect strong hints of a vicarious approval of what is ostensibly being satirized." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author managed] to synthesize the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Predated Solzhenitsyn by some years in providing a morbid anatomy of Stalinism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[A] depiction of a coming environmental and societal apocalypse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Prescient and haunting." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] enthralling memoir." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Marvellous." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Soothingly pessimistic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A rugged study of British Great War generalship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Shows the germinal, contradictory force of revolutionary politics." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Has many merits." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Charming and melancholy album of silhouettes." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the finest hymns of hate to authority to have come down to us." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"We all take some intellectual baggage when we set off, but [this author's], is positively weighed down." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Admirable." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Endlessly consultable." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author] found he'd taken on all the great American themes, from the original 'dream' itself to the corresponding loss of innocence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] most superbly rendered fictional creation." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the few faultless three-act plays ever written." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author]'s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, [...] are encoded in this book as in no other." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A very good history of the general events without which the American Revolution couldn't have taken place or would have taken a different form." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said he was reading this book in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)

"Begin with, say, 'Sredni Vashtar' or 'The Lumber-Room' or 'The Open Window.' Then see whether you can put the book down." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Exceptional." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] imperishable novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)

"Can and should be defended from the faint praise and outright sneering which have been directed at it." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Influenced me very greatly." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Instead of making you want to write, [makes] you wonder why you bother." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of [this author's] less-regarded but most magical and musical fictions." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I recommend it very highly." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A great book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Tremendous biography." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The most eloquent of the anti-Jeffersonian nonfictions." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Imperishable book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"It is an honor, even when it is not a pleasure, to register disagreement with [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The best fictional re-creation of the period." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"For me the most various and illuminating account of the slavery question." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Wonderful book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Classic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] finest novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Won the Geoffrey Faber Prize." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Won the Hawthornden Prize." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[A] fine novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Was almost proscribed by law in France before being properly distributed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"My favorite book on Islam." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Argues that in order to appreciate the pluralist, tolerant side of Islam, we must confront its ugly, extremist side." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The best critique of ['Orientalism' by Edward W. Said]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The best anatomy of the topic that I've yet read." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[Questions] the moral heroism of India's most revered figure." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Exquisite." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Such an exciting book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Brilliantly done." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Very absorbing." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[A] marvelous novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"One of the best books I've ever read. I have no choice but to say so." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The parts of [this famous book] that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment 'reports.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author] would tape his own memories of [his talks with Bill Clinton] on the drive back home. [This book] is the consequence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Since [Hitler's] suicide, no one has fully explained how a talentless crank was able to turn Europe into a charnel house. [This book] supplies a piece of the puzzle." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor-Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only [this] relatively short book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Brilliant." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I recommend." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author is] one of the finest volunteers in this cause." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual chattelhood to a new life in Holland." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I would urge you all to go out and buy [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] critique of impure reason." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Very interesting." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Evokes the charms and hatreds of a lost world—and the enduring contradictions of anti-Semitism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The only Turkish historian to have talked of genocide." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"From reading [this book] one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[With this book, the author] became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"These pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I was very struck by the courtesy and grace of this famous polemic and by the way that [the author] combined firmness on his own part with an understanding of the position of others." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] electrifying first book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The narrator of [this book] is relating his story against the clock, as the German homeland finds itself pulverized and encircled in the spring of 1945." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"Unflinchingly discusses the ruins and the corpses." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] heart-freezing account [...] of the rape and murder and humiliation that fell on Germans in the territory taken by the Soviet army in 1945." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"I think [people] should read [this author]. In particular they should read 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' The poem that first arrested me." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The gold standard." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[This] biography reaches the heart of the labyrinth—the intense and wondrous life of Jorge Luis Borges." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[The author's] beautiful but patronizing memoir." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"When you read [this trilogy], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"When you read [this book], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"[I read this book] about 50 times before I was 15." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The odds in tonnage and gunnery are adjusted in favour of the British side by sheer discipline, pluck and morale." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"A service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)