“Hitch 22” by Christopher Hitchens
🕑 2 minute read || Updated August 22, 2024 || by Daniel Norther
Written without AI
8/10
Recommended for: Historians, Mad Scientists, Comedians, Veterans, and anyone who’s ever protested against anything. Get the audiobook instead of the text.
Great memoir. This autobiography was written by a journalist who met Nelson Mandela, shook hands with many US presidents, traveled to North Korea, got arrested by state police in several authoritarian states, and so on and so forth. It’s INTERESTING. He’s the sort of guy you can just listen to for hours without getting bored. His deep, rumbling, stoic voice is a glacier grinding away the world’s ignorance. There’s always a song beneath his words.
The first chapter is about Hitchens’s mother, Yvonne. This alone is worth the read. We all wish we had a mom this cool and the ability to pay homage to her with our words. He later talks about Mark Daily, a US Army soldier killed in Iraq, and you’ll love that chapter.
Some of the topics are dated, like the Iraq War of 2003, and the Argentinian War that happened… sometime between 1970 and 1995? About half of the book is talking about old stuff that most people don’t remember. But the other half is about important personal factors that will resonate with anyone of any time. You’ll know which chapter is which in about 20 seconds.
The audiobook is much better than the text. Hitchens could speak better than he could write, and he wrote very well. He’s just too wordy for today. Modern news sites can’t write as thickly as he wrote without getting ignored. The internet killed long-form poetry, like it or not. Only well-read people can read this book.
Hitchens continues to teach us. I’ve known him for more than 10 years on YouTube. But, if cancer hadn’t stolen him from us so soon, he wouldn’t have made it “big” online since he was born a long time ago (1949) and his writing style is too wordy, too meaty for the average audience nowadays. This is universal, since no one born before 1980 can have the internet mastery of a generation born in the web. So, he never made it “big” online but he did “make it.” He’s worth reading today. Once again, the audiobook is much better than the text.
