SOURCE: Keach, William. “How Bad Will It Get?” Raritan 10, no. 1 (summer 1990): 139–52.

In the following review of Prepared for the Worst, Keach commends Hitchens's coverage of the Middle East and Central America, but notes flaws in his analysis of other writers and his own “radical” socialist stance.

Minority report is what Christopher Hitchens calls his regular column in the Nation. These days the title seems especially, depressingly, apt. Along with his fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, Hitchens is one of the few socialist journalists based in this country with real national and international visibility: the pieces collected in Prepared for the Worst come from the New York Times and the Washington Post, from Harper's and the London Review of Books, as well as from the Nation and the New Statesman. Yet despite this range of circulation, Hitchens seems to be constituting more often than reporting on or for a...