Christopher Hitchens. Book Review - Hitch-22 - By Christopher Hitchens. The problem is that if you’re a public figure, especially a writer as extravagantly colorful and prolific as Hitchens (he’s written 11 books, 4 pamphlets and 4 collections of essays, and today appears regularly in Slate, The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair), you may scarcely be aware of how much of your own store of tales has dribbled out over the years, like a sack of flour with a small hole in it.
This makes the business of writing your memoir much harder. And it turns out that much of the autobiographical pith of “Hitch-22” has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Ian Parker’s excellent 2006 profile of Hitchens in , and it’s surprising how little to it that Hitchens now adds — how little, indeed, is in this book that’s generally considered the lymph and marrow of a traditional reminiscence.
We hear almost nothing of Hitchens’s two marriages or three children, and he certainly never discusses falling in love. None of this means that “Hitch-22” isn’t marvelous in its own way.