Christopher Hitchens Critical Essay | Critical Review by Tom Bethell

Critical Review by Tom Bethell

SOURCE: Bethell, Tom. “The Foe in Plain View.” National Review (7 April 1989): 49–51.

In the following review, Bethell offers a generally negative assessment of Prepared for the Worst.

I met Christopher Hitchens a year ago at Stanford University, strolling across the campus with a glass of red wine in his hand, en route to a terrorism conference. Unusually even for Stanford, everyone present seemed to be pro-terrorism, and from Hitchens the subject received a particularly witty defense. (The word itself “carries a conservative freight,” has “no meaning and no definition,” and so on. How the assembled professoriate gurgled with delight! This was before the Ayatollah put his foot in it by terrorizing Hitchens's left-wing friend Salman Rushdie.) Later that afternoon Hitchens told me he had recently discovered that he was a Jew. In England, his 92-year-old maternal grandmother (née Blumenthal) had told him about his family background in nineteenth-century...
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