Works by
Christopher Hitchens
(Writer)
[1949 - ]

• Inequalities in Zimbabwe (1979)

• Cyprus (1984)
  In a compelling study of great-power misconduct, Christopher Hitchens examines the events leading up to the partition of Cyprus and its legacy. He argues that the intervention of four major foreign powers, Turkey, Greece, Britain and the United States, turned a local dispute into a major disaster. In a new afterword, Hitchens reviews the implications of the Republic of Cyprus's applications for European union membership, the escalating regional arms race between Greece and Turkey, and last year's Greek Cypriot protests along the partition border.  Revised 1989 as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

• Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (1987)
  The case for the prosecution from Christopher Hitchens. The Elgin Marbles, designed and executed by Phidias to adorn the Parthenon, are some of the most beautiful sculptures of ancient Greece. In 1801 Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Turkish government in Athens, had pieces of the frieze sawn off and removed to Britain, where they remain, igniting a storm of controversy which has continued to the present day. In this reissue of the first full-length work on this fiercely debated issue, Christopher Hitchens recounts the history of these precious sculptures and forcefully makes the case for their return to Greece. Drawing Out the artistic, moral, legal and political perspectives of the argument, Hitchens's eloquent prose makes The Elgin Marbles an invaluable contribution to one of the most important cultural controversies of our times.  Also Known as The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece?

• Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports (1988)

• Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies: (1990)
  Reissued 2004 as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship

• For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (1993)

• The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995)
  Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what, asks Christopher Hitchens, makes Mother Teresa so divine? In a frank expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish is to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answer any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds.

• No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999)
  'Clintonism' is not an idea, or a program; still less is it a principle. It represents what might be termed-were it not for its murk-the distilled essence of consensus politics. Unremarkable in its constituent elements, which are a mixture of opportunist statecraft, crony capitalism, 'divide and rule' identity politics, and populist manipulation, Clintonism has nonetheless raised these ordinary practices to the level of theory. It has succeeded, argues the author, because of a stealthy appeal to the waning and insecure forces of an American liberalism gone bad. Christopher Hitchens followed Governor Clinton through New Hampshire in 1992, and has remained an assiduous student of his methods ever since. In No One Left to Lie To, he profiles the rise and decline of some prominent Clintonoids, from George Stephanopoulos to the First Lady. He scrutinizes the debased new language in which the discourse of Clintonism has been couched, and proposes that, if successful, the Clinton machine will become the model of pseudo-democracy for the coming century.  Also known as No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family

• Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)
  What passes for political discussion in conventional circles rarely runs the gamut, even from A to B. To probe the deeper meanings of power requires inquiry beyond the vapidity of would-be Presidents, in Britain as well as the US. Fiction has traditionally been an alternative container for such ideas, sometimes a soapbox, sometimes a sanctuary, but always available and frequently used. Many have seen the meeting between literature and politics as necessarily fraught. Norman Podhoretz examined the intersection under the rubric "The Bloody Crossroads". Christopher Hitchens, in this sparkling engagement with novels and their authors, pursues a different approach. Taking inspiration from Shelley's description of the poet as an "unacknowledged legislator", he shows that while the encounter between writers and those in power is not always smooth, it generally embodies a dialectic that is well worth pursuit. Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist, so effectively deployed with the publication of the best-selling No One Left to Lie To, are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists. Here Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal's encounters with American revolution are scrutinized in interview; George Orwell's role as a fulcrum between left and right is carefully weighed; an appraisal of the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie becomes a meditation on the West's misunderstood encounter with Islam; Ernest Hemingway is defended against the vagaries of fashion; and Hitchens's delicious literary taste skips along a line from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, through Philip Larkin and Patrick O'Brian, to Walter Mosley,Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag.

• Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
  A witty, wise, biting, and completely individual meditation on what it means to think, live, and be to the contrary.
  
  In the book that he was born to write, provocateur and best-selling author Christopher Hitchens inspires future generations of radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, angry young (wo)men, and dissidents. Who better to speak to that person who finds him or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in profound and entertaining ways.
  
  This book explores the entire range of "contrary positions"-from noble dissident to gratuitous pain in the butt. In an age of overly polite debate bending over backward to reach a happy consensus within an increasingly centrist political dialogue, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast. He bemoans the loss of the skills of dialectical thinking evident in contemporary society. He understands the importance of disagreement-to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress-heck, to democracy itself. Epigrammatic, spunky, witty, in your face, timeless and timely, this book is everything you would expect from a mentoring contrarian.

• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002)
  Drawing on first-hand testimony, previously unpublished documentation and broad sweeps through material released under the Freedom of Information Act, Hitchens mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.

• Why Orwell Matters (2002)
  In this widely acclaimed biographical essay, Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. In true emulative and contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem. Answering both the detractors and the false claimants, Hitchens tears down the façade of sainthood erected by the hagiographers and rebuts the critics point by point. He examines Orwell and his perspectives on fascism, empire, feminism, and Englishness, as well as his outlook on America, a country and culture towards which he exhibited much ambivalence.
  
  Whether thinking about empires or dictators, race or class, nationalism or popular culture, Orwell's moral outlook remains indispensable in a world that has undergone vast changes in the fifty years since his death. Combining the best of Hitchens's polemical punch and intellectual elegance in a tightly woven and subtle argument, this book addresses not only why Orwell matters today, but how he will continue to matter in a future, uncertain world.
  
  Christopher Hitchens, one of the most incisive minds of our own age, meets Orwell on the page in this provocative encounter of wit, contention and moral truth.  Also known as Orwell's Victory.

• A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003)

• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (2004)
  "I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other ‘profession’ that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he’s reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.

• Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005)
  In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father. Situating Jefferson within the context of America's evolution and tracing his legacy over the past two hundred years, Hitchens brings the character of Jefferson to life as a man of his time and also as a symbolic figure beyond it.
  
  Conflicted by power, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as Minister to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery would shape the future of America's development, this professed proponent of emancipation elided the issue in the Declaration and continued to own human property. An eloquent writer, he was an awkward public speaker; a reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy.
  
  Jefferson's statesmanship enabled him to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with France, doubling the size of the nation, and he authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition, opening up the American frontier for exploration and settlement. Hitchens also analyzes Jefferson's handling of the Barbary War, a lesser-known chapter of his political career, when his attempt to end the kidnapping and bribery of Americans by the Barbary states, and the subsequent war with Tripoli, led to the building of the U.S. navy and the fortification of America's reputation regarding national defense.
  
  In the background of this sophisticated analysis is a large historical drama: the fledgling nation's struggle for independence, formed in the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, the deformation of that struggle in the excesses of the French Revolution. This artful portrait of a formative figure and a turbulent era poses a challenge to anyone interested in American history -- or in the ambiguities of human nature.

• Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (2006)

• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
  In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

See also:

• Callaghan, the Road to Number Ten (1976) with Peter Kellner

• International Territor: the United Nations, 1945-95 (1994) by Adam Bartos and Christopher Hitchens

• Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988), Edited by Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said

• When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (1994) with Ed Kashi