Hitchens is, as usual, all sorts of awesome. This is a great book mostly because it gives you a glimpse into Hitchens just before he became known as a "neocon" for his support of the invasion of Iraq, and before he was known less as a journalist and more as an atheist.

In the essays in this book, you can see what drives the man, what makes him who he is, and why he is such a massive intellectual force. Neocon is a massive misnomer for a man who is fairly radical in his humanism and anti-theism. At his core, Hitchens proves himself to be a product of his generation, the English generation born just after the end of WWII. At his core, Hitchens is simply an anti-fascist. This anti-fascism made him a figurehead of the left in his earlier years, and this same impulse made him defend Salman Rushdie and his ilk (Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali), and, later, support the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, as well as supporting the fight against religious extremism. Neocon my ass. Hitchens is the intellectual the west needs, not the one it deserves.

The essays themselves are for the most part classic Hitchens. The weakest section was the "Love," section, which is less due to any lack of skill on Hitchens part, and more due to the fact that it gets pretty boring to listen to someone rave about that which he loves (unless you happen to love the same things). Not that I dislike Graham Greene or Marcel Proust, I'm just not quite as ardent an admire as he is. Hitchens is at his best when he's a cultural and political commentator - see his polemics against the great religious figures or his writing on the Post-9/11 world - and is impossible not to enjoy reading.

If only I were more literary, then I could've given this five stars. Rock on, Hitch.