Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (2004)

Christopher Hitchens is consistently one of the most provocative (if at times arrogant) journalists in the world. This book is a collection of essays he's published in the Nation, Vanity Fair, and a number of other publications in the last few years. The first section, titled "Love," is purely literary criticism, and it's a fabulous demonstration of his elegance with the pen. He writes on a number of authors, Joyce, Proust, Orwell (of course), Borges, and a number of others. These essays are all pretty much first-rate; I may even come to take pleasure in his work about the arts more than his political analysis.

The second section, titled "Poverty," contains essays on a number of political/sociological topics and figures such as Mother Teresa, Michael Moore, David Irving, and so forth. They vary in quality and levels of intellectual content, and are perhaps mostly mere polemics.

The third section titled "War," is pure politics, and it begins with some fine essays about September 11, in which Hitchens provides his insight/feelings about that event. However, the final half of the section is more or less devoted to the Iraq war, which is where Hitchens very badly misses the mark. I don't object to his decidedly more "Hawkish" view of combating Islamic Jihad than the majority of the left, however I do object to his sweeping indictments of those on the left who do not hold the same point of view. Hitchens includes his embarrassing "Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky," wherein he stupidly responds to a rebuttal from Chomsky which he himself instigated by trying to argue that Chomsky was "rationalizing" Al Qida's crimes by comparing them to Clinton's bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998. Unfortunately the book does not include any of Chomsky's side of the debate so it appears as though Hitchens has rightly corrected Chomsky's error, however when you read all four of the articles written collectively it's clear that it was actually Chomsky who won the debate in a number of crucial respects; Hitchens refuses to admit that the bombing of the plant was a greater crime than 9/11 (which it was, approximately 10,000 people perished), which reveals is ethnocentrism. I don't think Hitchens still actually believes that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is truly humanitarian in nature; he is simply unwilling to admit his error. Despite his unevenness, Hitchens is a bright writer and worth reading, and "Love, Poverty, and War" is a potent collection. ( )