Christopher Hitchens Book Recommendations
Christopher Hitchens was an English intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, journalist, and columnist.
(Read more on Wikipedia)232 Books Recommended
Diaries
by George Orwell
"Can greatly enrich our understanding of how [the author] transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Girl, 20
by Kingsley Amis
"[The author]'s neglected masterpiece novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Mackerel Plaza
A Novel
by Peter De Vries
"Could make you laugh out loud." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Gulag Archipelago (3 books)
"Once [the author] succeeded in getting [this series printed], it became obvious that something terminal had happened to the edifice of Soviet power." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Blood of the Lamb
A Novel
by Peter De Vries
"[Could make you] weep." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Money
A Suicide Note
by Martin Amis
"The Great English Novel of the 1980s." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Writers and Politics
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
"Influenced me enormously when I first found it in a public library in Devonshire in 1967." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Regeneration (3 books)
"Magnificent." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Southern California
An Island on the Land
by Carey McWilliams
"Was, and still is, considered more or less the book to beat." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The File
by Penn Kimball
"A well-controlled masterpiece of frigid outrage at America’s betrayal of a loyal citizen." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Holy Bible
"[The best document] in human history that [is] the product of a committee." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Constitutional Law
Cases-Comments-Questions
by William B. Lockhart
"Great attendant volume." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Monument
Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
by Kanan Makiya
"Possibly the most penetrating of his many books about Saddam and Saddamism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Reading Lolita in Tehran
A Memoir in Books
by Azar Nafisi
"A study of the relations between literature, sexuality, and power under Muslim theocracy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Children in Exile
by James Fenton
"An essential complement to their predecessors." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Beyond a Boundary
by C.L.R. James
"Suggests that in several ways [cricket] is not really a 'sport' at all, but more of a classical art form." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Minty Alley
by C.L.R. James
"Plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Black Jacobins
Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
by C.L.R. James
"[The author's] monumental work." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
by Victor Serge
"Many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
by Victor Serge
"One of the finest autobiographies of that same century." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Watching the Door
Drinking Up, Getting Down, and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast
by Kevin Myers
"The most witty and penetrating first-hand account of [1970s Belfast]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Bell Jar
A Novel
by Sylvia Plath
"When I myself first read [this book], the phrase of hers that most arrested me was the one with which she described her father's hometown." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Savage God
by A. Alvarez
"Returns often to the suicide of Cesare Pavese, who took his own life at the apparent height of his powers." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
War And Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
"At the age of twelve I had summoned the nerve to borrow from the headmaster, and to read [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Jordan Peterson, Larry King, Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Mandela, Mark Manson
History of the Conquest of Mexico
by William H. Prescott
"Emboldened by the sheer bulk of the thing, I swerved into [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
"Leaves an ineradicable 'scratch on the mind.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
How Green Was My Valley
How Green Was My Valley, Book 1
by Richard Llewellyn
"The transition to me between reading 'books for boys' and 'adult reading' was [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Darkness at Noon
A Novel
by Arthur Koestler
"I was re-reading [this book] for what felt like (and quite possibly was) the third time in a month." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"I couldn’t sleep for two nights after first reading [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Jordan Peterson, Esther Perel, Larry King, PewDiePie, Jim Cramer, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Carrey, Brian Dean, Jack Edwards
In Flanders Fields
The 1917 Campaign
by Leon Wolff
"A revisionist history of the First World War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
"I became consumed with the subject [of World War I] and got hold of [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Covenant with Death
by John Harris
"An anti-war British novel of the trenches." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell
"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Jordan Peterson, J. Cole, Whitney Cummings, Daniel Pink, Vlad Tenev, Sahil Lavingia, Lex Fridman
1984
by George Orwell
"We were all expected to read Animal Farm and [this book], which had been placed on the syllabus as part of the curriculum of the Cold War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Tristan Harris, Jordan Peterson, J. Cole, Emma Watson, Noam Chomsky, Richard Branson, Matt Mullenweg, Sahil Lavingia, Jenn Im, Winston Churchill, Diane Rehm, Anna Akana, Brad Delong
Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
"I was fairly soon immersed in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Decline and Fall
by Evelyn Waugh
"Have somehow made all this mania and ritual appear 'normal,' even praiseworthy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
"Discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Collected Works of P. G. Wodehouse
by PG Wodehouse
"How can I forget the moment when [I] learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language—always the language—was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry?" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Power
A Radical View
by Steven Lukes
"[The author was] more celebrated still for [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Theatres of Memory
Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
by Raphael Samuel
"Still a potent and eloquent reminder of a braver time." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D.H. Lawrence
"Plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Main Currents of Marxism
The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown
by Leszek Kolakowski
"Astonishing trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Republic of Fear
The Politics of Modern Iraq
by Kanan Makiya
"[The author's] path-breaking anatomy of the Ba'ath regime." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Cruelty and Silence
War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World
by Kanan Makiya
"About the Saddam tyranny and the wars and famines and plagues it had sponsored." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Adolf Hitler My Part in His Downfall
War (and Peace) Memoirs, Book 1
by Spike Milligan
"About being a shambolic conscript in some forgotten cookhouse in the wartime British Army." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Threatening Storm
The Case for Invading Iraq
by Kenneth M. Pollack
"One of the best pieces of closely marshaled evidence and reasoning ever to emerge from the wonk-world." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Oxford Shakespeare
The Complete Works
by William Shakespeare
Christopher Hitchens mentioned Shakespeare's work in the "Hitch-22" book. (Source)
Also recommended by:
Shah Rukh Khan, J.K. Rowling, Barack Obama, Stewart Brand, Ricardo Semler, Fred Wilson, Mark Twain
Terminal Moraine
by James Fenton
"[The author's] first collection of published poems." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Language and Silence
by George Steiner
"[The author's] imposing collection of essays." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Judgment Of Paris
by Gore Vidal
"I winced with recognition when I first read the expression 'British teeth' in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Yellow Dog
by Martin Amis
"You might think that the contempt shown by the reporters for both their subjects and their readers is overdone, but you would be wrong." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Rachel Papers
by Martin Amis
"A huge critical and commercial grand slam." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
"[The author] was perhaps not such a fool when he wrote in [this book] that all conceptions are immaculate." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Humboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
"I was able to return [Martin Amis] the favor in a way which was to help change his life in turn, by pressing on him a copy [of this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Dance to the Music of Time
First Movement
by Anthony Powell
"[The author's] complex, majestic, rhythmical twelve-volume novel sequence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
First Love, Last Rites
by Ian McEwan
"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
In Between the Sheets
by Ian McEwan
"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Faggots
by Larry Kramer
"The book of still another friend, [the author]’s ultrahomosexual effort." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number
by Jacobo Timerman
"The book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Novel
by Tom Wolfe
"Shortly after I arrived in New York, [this author] claimed to have diagnosed the same syndrome in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Protestant Establishment
Aristocracy and Caste in America
by E. Digby Baltzell
"[The acronym 'WASP' was] first minted by [this author in this book], the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Company Of Critics
Social Criticsm And Political Commitment In The Twentieth Century
by Michael Walzer
"[In this book, the author] says that most of his friends and colleagues have never even visited Washington except to protest." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Raj Quartet
The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion
by Paul Scott
"Had spoken to my depths because it understood that the treason at midnight in 1947, and the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan, was a tragedy for the English too." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Shame
A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
"[Anatomizes] the heap of madnesses and contradictions that went to make up the nightmarish state of Pakistan." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Jaguar Smile
by Salman Rushdie
"About a voyage to revolutionary Nicaragua." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Orientalism
by Edward W. Said
"A book that made one think." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Covering Islam
How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
by Edward W. Said
"It was with [the author's] much lesser effort, [this book], that I began to realize that there was an apparently narrow but very deep difference between us." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Peace And Its Discontents
Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process
by Edward W. Said
"At [the author's] request I even wrote an uninspired introduction to [this book], but my heart was not quite in it." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Benn Diaries
The Definitive Collection
by Tony Benn
"Recorded a meeting of like-minded members of Parliament the day after the fatwah." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Dream of John Ball
Illustrated
by William Morris
"[Wrote that] men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Minima Moralia
Reflections from Damaged Life
by Theodor Adorno
"Made a beautiful corkscrew or double-helix-shaped aphorism about the Hays Office." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Tortilla Flat
by John Steinbeck
"[The main character] manages to lay so many women that, afterward, even the females who didn’t receive his attentions prefer to claim, rather than appear to have been overlooked, that they were included, too." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Persuasion
by Jane Austen
"Captain Frederick Wentworth in [this book], is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Watership Down
A Novel
by Richard Adams
"[The author's] masterpiece." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Microcosm
A Portrait of a Central European City
by Norman Davies
"Illustrates [Wroclaw's] eminence as a hub of Bohemian and Prussian life as well as the epicenter of the Silesian question." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Pity of It All
A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933
by Amos Elon
"The best history of the German-Jewish relationship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
They Fought Back
The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe
by Yuri Suhl
"Combats the wretched image of European Jews as fatalistic and passive." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Cruiser
by Warren Tute
"[In this book], my father appears under the name (no first or 'Christian' name) of Lieutenant Hale." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Broken Compass
by Peter Hitchens
"Contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
by Julian Barnes
"[A] meditation on death." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Enigma of Arrival
by V. S. Naipaul
"While recently rereading [this book], I was struck all over again by the breathtakingly observant operations of [the author's] eye and brain." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The World Is What It Is
The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
by Patrick French
"Astonishing (and astonishingly authorized) biography." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Fireflies
by Shiva Naipaul
"One of the great tragicomic novels of our day." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
America Alone
The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn
"A welcome wake-up call." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
"[The author] essentially recast his friend Thomas Carlyle’s pessimistic version of the French Revolution in fictional form in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
J.K. Rowling, Amelia Boone, Oprah Winfrey, Mahatma Gandhi, Maya Angelou
The Grass Is Singing
A Novel
by Doris Lessing
"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
This Was the Old Chief's Country
Collected African Stories
by Doris Lessing
"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Day Stalin Died
by Doris Lessing
"[Deserves] reprinting in any anthology of the prose of the 20th century." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney
and Other Stories
by Doris Lessing
"[This story] was so good, and [it] seemed so much to know what I might be thinking myself, that I was almost afraid to read on." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
by Doris Lessing
"Somewhat too romantic an account of the rebels fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
"Evokes [the author's] homeland's natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Principia Mathematica
Volume One
by Bertrand Russell
"[The author's] most imposing work is probably [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
by Karl Marx
"[The author's] best-ever essay." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Epic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Neil Strauss, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Cal Fussman, Fred Wilson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Shashi Tharoor
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
by Bertrand Russell
"Was the first and in many ways the most penetrating critique." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Lesser Evil
The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59
by Victor Klemperer
"There is a horrid fascination in reading this day-by-day chronicle as it unfolds." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Imperialism at Bay
The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945
by William Roger Louis
"As its title implies, [this book] is more prepared to call things by their unambiguous names." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Cain
A Mystery
by Lord Byron
"Actually a very moving and despairing assault on biblical literalism and servile human credulity." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
"[The author's] 1939 classic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
"[I] re-read it in one session, marveling again at how fine it is." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Martyr's Day
Chronicle of a Small War
by Michael Kelly
"[The author's] book about the 'first' Gulf War." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
"In [this book], one can often detect strong hints of a vicarious approval of what is ostensibly being satirized." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Jordan Peterson, Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, Matt Mullenweg, Stewart Brand, Sam Altman, Sahil Lavingia, Winston Churchill, PewDiePie
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
"[The author managed] to synthesize the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Great Terror
A Reassessment
by Robert Conquest
"Predated Solzhenitsyn by some years in providing a morbid anatomy of Stalinism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Ecology of Fear
Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
by Mike Davis
"[A] depiction of a coming environmental and societal apocalypse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Nightfrost in Prague
by Zdenek Mlynar
"[The author's] enthralling memoir." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
How Democracies Perish
by Jean-Francois Revel
"Soothingly pessimistic." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Donkeys
by Alan Clark
"A rugged study of British Great War generalship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The New York Intellectuals
The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s
by Alan M. Wald
"Shows the germinal, contradictory force of revolutionary politics." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Strange Death of Liberal England
by George Dangerfield
"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Victorian England
Portrait of an Age
by G.M. Young
"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Anarchist Portraits
by Paul Avrich
"Charming and melancholy album of silhouettes." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Mask of Anarchy
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
"One of the finest hymns of hate to authority to have come down to us." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Holidays in Hell
by P. J. O'Rourke
"We all take some intellectual baggage when we set off, but [this author's], is positively weighed down." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
by Richard Hofstadter
"Endlessly consultable." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"[The author] found he'd taken on all the great American themes, from the original 'dream' itself to the corresponding loss of innocence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Daniel Pink, Ev Williams, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jim Carrey, Ryan Holiday
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
"[The author's] most superbly rendered fictional creation." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
"One of the few faultless three-act plays ever written." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
"[The author]'s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, [...] are encoded in this book as in no other." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Struggle for Power
The American Revolution
by Theodore Draper
"A very good history of the general events without which the American Revolution couldn't have taken place or would have taken a different form." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Greenmantle
Richard Hannay, Book 2
by John Buchan
Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)
The Prophet Outcast
Trotsky 1929-1940
by Isaac Deutscher
Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)
Maps for Lost Lovers
by Nadeem Aslam
Christopher Hitchens said he was reading this book in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. (Source)
The Complete Short Stories of Saki
by H. H. Munro
"Begin with, say, 'Sredni Vashtar' or 'The Lumber-Room' or 'The Open Window.' Then see whether you can put the book down." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Complete Poems
by Philip Larkin
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Collected Poems
by Robert Conquest
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Also recommended by:
Selected Poems
by James Fenton
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
by W. B. Yeats
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Serious Concerns
by Wendy Cope
Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. (Source)
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
"Can and should be defended from the faint praise and outright sneering which have been directed at it." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
"Influenced me very greatly." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
"Instead of making you want to write, [makes] you wonder why you bother." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Satanic Verses
A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
"One of [this author's] less-regarded but most magical and musical fictions." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Christianity
The First Three Thousand Years
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
"I recommend it very highly." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Siege
The Saga of Israel and Zionism
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
"A great book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Great Melody
A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
"Tremendous biography." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Long Affair
Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
"The most eloquent of the anti-Jeffersonian nonfictions." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Edmund Burke
"Imperishable book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Jefferson and His Time
by Dumas Malone
"It is an honor, even when it is not a pleasure, to register disagreement with [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Burr
A Novel
by Gore Vidal
"The best fictional re-creation of the period." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Wolf by the Ears
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
by John Chester Miller
"For me the most various and illuminating account of the slavery question." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Lincoln
A Novel
by Gore Vidal
"[The author's] finest novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Prophet Armed
Trotsky 1879-1921
by Isaac Deutscher
"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Prophet Unarmed
Trotsky 1921-1929
by Isaac Deutscher
"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1
A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1933-1941
by Victor Klemperer
"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2
A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945
by Victor Klemperer
"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
An Insular Possesion
by Timothy Mo
"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Redundancy of Courage
by Timothy Mo
"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Whatever
by Michel Houellebecq
"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Atomised
by Michel Houellebecq
"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Platform
by Michel Houellebecq
"Was almost proscribed by law in France before being properly distributed." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Two Faces of Islam
Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism
by Stephen Schwartz
"Argues that in order to appreciate the pluralist, tolerant side of Islam, we must confront its ugly, extremist side." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Defending the West
A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism
by Ibn Warraq
"The best critique of ['Orientalism' by Edward W. Said]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Move Your Shadow
South Africa, Black and White
by Joseph Lelyveld
"The best anatomy of the topic that I've yet read." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Great Soul
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
by Joseph Lelyveld
"[Questions] the moral heroism of India's most revered figure." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Dreyfus
Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
by Ruth Harris
"Such an exciting book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Long Long Way
Dunne Family, Book 3
by Sebastian Barry
"Brilliantly done." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Alexander
The Ambiguity of Greatness
by Guy Maclean Rogers
"Very absorbing." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Persian Boy
Alexander the Great, Book 2
by Mary Renault
"[A] marvelous novel." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Bosnia
A Short History
by Noel Malcolm
"One of the best books I've ever read. I have no choice but to say so." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Dominion
The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
by Matthew Scully
"Asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Animal Liberation
The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement
by Peter Singer
"The parts of [this famous book] that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment 'reports.'" - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Parting the Waters
America in the King Years 1954-63
by Taylor Branch
"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Pillar of Fire
America in the King Years 1963-65
by Taylor Branch
"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
At Canaan's Edge
America in the King Years, 1965-68
by Taylor Branch
"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Clinton Tapes
Conversations with a President, 1993 - 2001
by Taylor Branch
"[The author] would tape his own memories of [his talks with Bill Clinton] on the drive back home. [This book] is the consequence." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Hitler
1889-1936 Hubris
by Ian Kershaw
"Since [Hitler's] suicide, no one has fully explained how a talentless crank was able to turn Europe into a charnel house. [This book] supplies a piece of the puzzle." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Meaning of Hitler
by Sebastian Haffner
"You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor-Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only [this] relatively short book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Selling Hitler
The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century
by Robert Harris
"Brilliant." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
40 Days and 40 Nights
Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania
by Matthew Chapman
"I recommend." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The End of Faith
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
"[The author is] one of the finest volunteers in this cause." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Infidel
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
"Describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual chattelhood to a new life in Holland." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Caged Virgin
An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
"I would urge you all to go out and buy [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Voltaire's Bastards
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
by John Ralston Saul
"[The author's] critique of impure reason." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
By Any Means Necessary
Trials And Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X
by Spike Lee
"Very interesting." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
A Novel in Five Stories
by Gregor Von Rezzori
"Evokes the charms and hatreds of a lost world—and the enduring contradictions of anti-Semitism." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Bomb in My Garden
The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind
by Mahdi Obeidi
"A memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Shameful Act
by Taner Akçam
"The only Turkish historian to have talked of genocide." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
"From reading [this book] one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
"[With this book, the author] became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Armenian Golgotha
A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918
by Grigoris Balakian
"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Rebel Land
Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
by Christopher de Bellaigue
"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford
"These pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
The Captive Mind
by Czeslaw Milosz
"I was very struck by the courtesy and grace of this famous polemic and by the way that [the author] combined firmness on his own part with an understanding of the position of others." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Portrait in Sepia
Daughter Of Fortune, Book 2
by Isabel Allende
"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"[The author's] electrifying first book." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Doctor Faustus
The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend
by Thomas Mann
"The narrator of [this book] is relating his story against the clock, as the German homeland finds itself pulverized and encircled in the spring of 1945." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Silent Angel
by Heinrich Böll
"Unflinchingly discusses the ruins and the corpses." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Fall of Berlin 1945
by Antony Beevor
"[The author's] heart-freezing account [...] of the rape and murder and humiliation that fell on Germans in the territory taken by the Soviet army in 1945." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen
by Wilfred Owen
"I think [people] should read [this author]. In particular they should read 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' The poem that first arrested me." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Borges
A Life
by Edwin Williamson
"[This] biography reaches the heart of the labyrinth—the intense and wondrous life of Jorge Luis Borges." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Bitter Lemons
by Lawrence Durrell
"[The author's] beautiful but patronizing memoir." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen & Unconditional Surrender
by Evelyn Waugh
"When you read [this trilogy], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
A Dance to the Music of Time
Third Movement
by Anthony Powell
"When you read [this book], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Cruel Sea
by Nicholas Monsarrat
"[I read this book] about 50 times before I was 15." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The Ship
by C. S. Forester
"The odds in tonnage and gunnery are adjusted in favour of the British side by sheer discipline, pluck and morale." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Coming Up for Air
by George Orwell
"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Daughter of Fortune
Daughter Of Fortune, Book 1
by Isabel Allende
"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
"A service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
Also recommended by:
A Clergyman's Daughter
by George Orwell
"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens (Source)
