I always feel like I'm slogging through this part of the book as they make a case for critical moments at prep school or their mommy didn't love them enough or some other claptrap. Invariably with autobiographies, or biographies for that matter, a certain percentage of the book always has to be spent examining ones childhood. I didn't always agree with him, but found that he had a knack for wiggling some doubt into my own convictions. As he aged he never lost the fire in his belly and always felt he could right a wrong. Even people who don't consider themselves right or left know who he is. He wrote incendiary articles that would invariably find their way into my email box or into a magazine I subscribe to.

(He followed his friend Gore Vidal's advice never to turn down a chance to be on TV.) He attended rallies and protests domestic and foreign. This is my first time reading a Christopher Hitchens's book of course, it is not my first exposure to Hitchens. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well? Kurt Vonnegut: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason. The Septemattacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called 'fascism with an Islamic face.' He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.

Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the 'tepid reaction' of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a 'Democratic Socialist.' While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books - the most famous being God Is Not Great - made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic.

Hitch 22 a memoir