232 Books recommended by Christopher Hitchens


Selling Hitler
The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century
Author :Robert Harris

"Brilliant." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Daniel Deronda
Author :George Eliot

"Can and should be defended from the faint praise and outright sneering which have been directed at it." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Clinton Tapes
Conversations with a President, 1993 - 2001
Author :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]

Brideshead Revisited
Author :Evelyn Waugh

"Discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Prophet Outcast
Trotsky 1929-1940
Author :Isaac Deutscher

Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. [Source]

The Great Gatsby
Author :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]

Watership Down
A Novel
Author :Richard Adams

"[The author's] masterpiece." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

At Canaan's Edge
America in the King Years, 1965-68
Author :Taylor Branch

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Collected Works of P. G. Wodehouse
Author :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]

The Judgment Of Paris
Author :Gore Vidal

"I winced with recognition when I first read the expression 'British teeth' in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Holy Bible
Author :-

"[The best document] in human history that [is] the product of a committee." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Theatres of Memory
Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
Author :Raphael Samuel

"Still a potent and eloquent reminder of a braver time." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Black Jacobins
Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Author :C.L.R. James

"[The author's] monumental work." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

My Name Is Red
Author :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]


The Monument
Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Author :Kanan Makiya

"Possibly the most penetrating of his many books about Saddam and Saddamism." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Principia Mathematica
Volume One
Author :Bertrand Russell

"[The author's] most imposing work is probably [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

An Opposing Man
Author :Ernst Fischer

"Marvellous." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Shameful Act
Author :Taner Akçam

"The only Turkish historian to have talked of genocide." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

America Alone
The End of the World as We Know It
Author :Mark Steyn

"A welcome wake-up call." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Benn Diaries
The Definitive Collection
Author :Tony Benn

"Recorded a meeting of like-minded members of Parliament the day after the fatwah." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Protestant Establishment
Aristocracy and Caste in America
Author :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]

War And Peace
Author :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]


They Fought Back
The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe
Author :Yuri Suhl

"Combats the wretched image of European Jews as fatalistic and passive." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Doctor Zhivago
Author :Boris Pasternak

"[The author] was perhaps not such a fool when he wrote in [this book] that all conceptions are immaculate." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]



For Whom the Bell Tolls
Author :Ernest Hemingway

"Influenced me very greatly." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]



Southern California
An Island on the Land
Author :Carey McWilliams

"Was, and still is, considered more or less the book to beat." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Author :Karl Marx

"[The author's] best-ever essay." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Mask of Anarchy
Author :Percy Bysshe Shelley

"One of the finest hymns of hate to authority to have come down to us." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Rebel Land
Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
Author :Christopher de Bellaigue

"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Portrait in Sepia
Daughter Of Fortune, Book 2
Author :Isabel Allende

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The New York Intellectuals
The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s
Author :Alan M. Wald

"Shows the germinal, contradictory force of revolutionary politics." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Animal Liberation
The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement
Author :Peter Singer

"The parts of [this famous book] that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment 'reports.'" - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

This Was the Old Chief's Country
Collected African Stories
Author :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 Cruiser
Author :Warren Tute

"[In this book], my father appears under the name (no first or 'Christian' name) of Lieutenant Hale." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Darkness at Noon
A Novel
Author :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]


The Complete Poems
Author :Philip Larkin

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]

Children in Exile
Author :James Fenton

"An essential complement to their predecessors." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Great Soul
Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
Author :Joseph Lelyveld

"[Questions] the moral heroism of India's most revered figure." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Savage God
Author :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]

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author :Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Epic." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Fall of Berlin 1945
Author :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
Author :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]


Watching the Door
Drinking Up, Getting Down, and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast
Author :Kevin Myers

"The most witty and penetrating first-hand account of [1970s Belfast]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

C.L.R. James
The Artist As Revolutionary
Author :Paul Buhle

"Admirable." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


All Quiet on the Western Front
Author :Erich Maria Remarque

"I became consumed with the subject [of World War I] and got hold of [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


In Between the Sheets
Author :Ian McEwan

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

A Struggle for Power
The American Revolution
Author :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]

The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen & Unconditional Surrender
Author :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]

Pillar of Fire
America in the King Years 1963-65
Author :Taylor Branch

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Anarchist Portraits
Author :Paul Avrich

"Charming and melancholy album of silhouettes." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Republic of Fear
The Politics of Modern Iraq
Author :Kanan Makiya

"[The author's] path-breaking anatomy of the Ba'ath regime." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Maps for Lost Lovers
Author :Nadeem Aslam

Christopher Hitchens said he was reading this book in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. [Source]

Brave New World
Author :Aldous Huxley

"In [this book], one can often detect strong hints of a vicarious approval of what is ostensibly being satirized." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

A Tale of Two Cities
Author :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]

An Insular Possesion
Author :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]

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Author :Julian Barnes

"[A] meditation on death." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

What Is History?
Author :Edward Hallet Carr

"Brilliant." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Animal Farm
Author :George Orwell

"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Prophet Armed
Trotsky 1879-1921
Author :Isaac Deutscher

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Move Your Shadow
South Africa, Black and White
Author :Joseph Lelyveld

"The best anatomy of the topic that I've yet read." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Redundancy of Courage
Author :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]

Lady Chatterley's Lover
Author :D.H. Lawrence

"Plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Imperialism at Bay
The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945
Author :William Roger Louis

"As its title implies, [this book] is more prepared to call things by their unambiguous names." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1
A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1933-1941
Author :Victor Klemperer

"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Oxford Shakespeare
The Complete Works
Author :William Shakespeare

Christopher Hitchens mentioned Shakespeare's work in the "Hitch-22" book. [Source]

The Jaguar Smile
Author :Salman Rushdie

"About a voyage to revolutionary Nicaragua." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Broken Compass
Author :Peter Hitchens

"Contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Bomb in My Garden
The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind
Author :Mahdi Obeidi

"A memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
A Novel in Five Stories
Author :Gregor Von Rezzori

"Evokes the charms and hatreds of a lost world—and the enduring contradictions of anti-Semitism." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Silent Angel
Author :Heinrich Böll

"Unflinchingly discusses the ruins and the corpses." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Orientalism
Author :Edward W. Said

"A book that made one think." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Coming Up for Air
Author :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]

Writers and Politics
Author :Conor Cruise O'Brien

"Influenced me enormously when I first found it in a public library in Devonshire in 1967." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Victorian England
Portrait of an Age
Author :G.M. Young

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Serious Concerns
Author :Wendy Cope

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]

In Flanders Fields
The 1917 Campaign
Author :Leon Wolff

"A revisionist history of the First World War." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Persian Boy
Alexander the Great, Book 2
Author :Mary Renault

"[A] marvelous novel." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Rachel Papers
Author :Martin Amis

"A huge critical and commercial grand slam." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author :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 Paranoid Style in American Politics
Author :Richard Hofstadter

"Endlessly consultable." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Bend Sinister
Author :Vladimir Nabokov

"Prescient and haunting." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


The Monkey King
Author :Timothy Mo

"Won the Geoffrey Faber Prize." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Satanic Verses
A Novel
Author :Salman Rushdie

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
Author :W. B. Yeats

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]

The Mackerel Plaza
A Novel
Author :Peter De Vries

"Could make you laugh out loud." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Hons and Rebels
Author :Jessica Mitford

"These pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Scenes of Clerical Life
Author :George Eliot

"The gold standard." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Day Stalin Died
Author :Doris Lessing

"[Deserves] reprinting in any anthology of the prose of the 20th century." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
Author :Bertrand Russell

"Was the first and in many ways the most penetrating critique." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Decline and Fall
Author :Evelyn Waugh

"Have somehow made all this mania and ritual appear 'normal,' even praiseworthy." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Meaning of Hitler
Author :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]

Constitutional Law
Cases-Comments-Questions
Author :William B. Lockhart

"Great attendant volume." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

How Green Was My Valley
How Green Was My Valley, Book 1
Author :Richard Llewellyn

"The transition to me between reading 'books for boys' and 'adult reading' was [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Defending the West
A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism
Author :Ibn Warraq

"The best critique of ['Orientalism' by Edward W. Said]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Blood of the Lamb
A Novel
Author :Peter De Vries

"[Could make you] weep." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Plague
Author :Albert Camus

"[The author's] imperishable novel." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Doctor Faustus
The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend
Author :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]

Middlemarch
Author :George Eliot

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The End of Faith
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Author :Sam Harris

"[The author is] one of the finest volunteers in this cause." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Selected Poems
Author :James Fenton

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]


A Long Long Way
Dunne Family, Book 3
Author :Sebastian Barry

"Brilliantly done." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


The Caged Virgin
An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
Author :Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"I would urge you all to go out and buy [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

First Love, Last Rites
Author :Ian McEwan

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Collected Poems
Author :Robert Conquest

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]

Daughter of Fortune
Daughter Of Fortune, Book 1
Author :Isabel Allende

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

How Democracies Perish
Author :Jean-Francois Revel

"Soothingly pessimistic." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Reading Lolita in Tehran
A Memoir in Books
Author :Azar Nafisi

"A study of the relations between literature, sexuality, and power under Muslim theocracy." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

On Chesil Beach
Author :Ian McEwan

"Evokes [the author's] homeland's natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Covering Islam
How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
Author :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]

On the Beach
Author :Nevil Shute

"[The author's] masterpiece." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Temptation of Jack Orkney
and Other Stories
Author :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]

A Clergyman's Daughter
Author :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]

Language and Silence
Author :George Steiner

"[The author's] imposing collection of essays." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Humboldt's Gift
Author :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]

Sour Sweet
Author :Timothy Mo

"Won the Hawthornden Prize." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Uncle Tom's Cabin
Author :Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Leaves an ineradicable 'scratch on the mind.'" - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Author :Victor Serge

"Many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Grass Is Singing
A Novel
Author :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]




Birth of Our Power
Author :Victor Serge

"Excellent." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Greenmantle
Richard Hannay, Book 2
Author :John Buchan

Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007. [Source]

The Book of Evidence
Author :John Banville

"[A] fine novel." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Threatening Storm
The Case for Invading Iraq
Author :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 Importance of Being Earnest
Author :Oscar Wilde

"One of the few faultless three-act plays ever written." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The World Is What It Is
The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Author :Patrick French

"Astonishing (and astonishingly authorized) biography." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


By Any Means Necessary
Trials And Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X
Author :Spike Lee

"Very interesting." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number
Author :Jacobo Timerman

"The book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Long Affair
Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800
Author :Conor Cruise O'Brien

"The most eloquent of the anti-Jeffersonian nonfictions." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Author :Rebecca West

"Wonderful book." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Culture of Terrorism
Author :Noam Chomsky

"Has many merits." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Prophet Unarmed
Trotsky 1921-1929
Author :Isaac Deutscher

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

In Search of Lost Time
Author :Marcel Proust

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]
A Dream of John Ball
Illustrated
Author :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]

A Dance to the Music of Time
First Movement
Author :Anthony Powell

"[The author's] complex, majestic, rhythmical twelve-volume novel sequence." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


The Lesser Evil
The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59
Author :Victor Klemperer

"There is a horrid fascination in reading this day-by-day chronicle as it unfolds." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]



The Company Of Critics
Social Criticsm And Political Commitment In The Twentieth Century
Author :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]

Jefferson and His Time
Author :Dumas Malone

"It is an honor, even when it is not a pleasure, to register disagreement with [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

History of the Conquest of Mexico
Author :William H. Prescott

"Emboldened by the sheer bulk of the thing, I swerved into [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Armenian Golgotha
A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918
Author :Grigoris Balakian

"I would recommend [this book] of exceptional interest and scholarship." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Collected Poems
Author :W. H. Auden

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]

Persuasion
Author :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]

Peace And Its Discontents
Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process
Author :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 Cruel Sea
Author :Nicholas Monsarrat

"[I read this book] about 50 times before I was 15." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

A Dance to the Music of Time
Third Movement
Author :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 Captive Mind
Author :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]

Bitter Lemons
Author :Lawrence Durrell

"[The author's] beautiful but patronizing memoir." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Minima Moralia
Reflections from Damaged Life
Author :Theodor Adorno

"Made a beautiful corkscrew or double-helix-shaped aphorism about the Hays Office." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Our Man in Havana
Author :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]


The Bell Jar
A Novel
Author :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]

The Adventures of Augie March
Author :Saul Bellow

"[The author's] most superbly rendered fictional creation." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Raj Quartet
The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion
Author :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]

Parting the Waters
America in the King Years 1954-63
Author :Taylor Branch

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Donkeys
Author :Alan Clark

"A rugged study of British Great War generalship." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Bridge on the Drina
Author :Ivo Andric

"Classic." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Martyr's Day
Chronicle of a Small War
Author :Michael Kelly

"[The author's] book about the 'first' Gulf War." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Author :Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"[The author's] electrifying first book." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton
Author :G. K. Chesterton

Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets. [Source]


Cruelty and Silence
War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World
Author :Kanan Makiya

"About the Saddam tyranny and the wars and famines and plagues it had sponsored." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


The Two Faces of Islam
Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism
Author :Stephen Schwartz

"Argues that in order to appreciate the pluralist, tolerant side of Islam, we must confront its ugly, extremist side." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Author :Victor Serge

"One of the finest autobiographies of that same century." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Homage to Catalonia
Author :George Orwell

"I was fairly soon immersed in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Yellow Dog
Author :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 Complete Short Stories of Saki
Author :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]

Voltaire's Bastards
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Author :John Ralston Saul

"[The author's] critique of impure reason." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2
A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945
Author :Victor Klemperer

"Don't start [this book] late at night, you will not get to bed." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Terminal Moraine
Author :James Fenton

"[The author's] first collection of published poems." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Moor's Last Sigh
Author :Salman Rushdie

"One of [this author's] less-regarded but most magical and musical fictions." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Reflections on the Revolution in France
Author :Edmund Burke

"Imperishable book." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Great Melody
A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke
Author :Conor Cruise O'Brien

"Tremendous biography." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Ecology of Fear
Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
Author :Mike Davis

"[A] depiction of a coming environmental and societal apocalypse." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Crime and Punishment
Author :Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I couldn’t sleep for two nights after first reading [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Covenant with Death
Author :John Harris

"An anti-war British novel of the trenches." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Hanged by the Neck
Author :Arthur Koestler

"A life-changing book." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Main Currents of Marxism
The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown
Author :Leszek Kolakowski

"Astonishing trilogy." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Enigma of Arrival
Author :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 Strange Death of Liberal England
Author :George Dangerfield

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Christianity
The First Three Thousand Years
Author :Diarmaid MacCulloch

"I recommend it very highly." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Nightfrost in Prague
Author :Zdenek Mlynar

"[The author's] enthralling memoir." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Tortilla Flat
Author :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]

The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Author :Doris Lessing

"Somewhat too romantic an account of the rebels fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The House of the Spirits
Author :Isabel Allende

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Great Terror
A Reassessment
Author :Robert Conquest

"Predated Solzhenitsyn by some years in providing a morbid anatomy of Stalinism." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Adolf Hitler My Part in His Downfall
War (and Peace) Memoirs, Book 1
Author :Spike Milligan

"About being a shambolic conscript in some forgotten cookhouse in the wartime British Army." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Grapes of Wrath
Author :John Steinbeck

"[The author's] 1939 classic." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

40 Days and 40 Nights
Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania
Author :Matthew Chapman

"I recommend." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Holidays in Hell
Author :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 Wolf by the Ears
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Author :John Chester Miller

"For me the most various and illuminating account of the slavery question." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Beyond a Boundary
Author :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]

The Pity of It All
A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933
Author :Amos Elon

"The best history of the German-Jewish relationship." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The God of Small Things
A Novel
Author :Arundhati Roy

"Exquisite." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]


Why I Am Not A Muslim
Author :Ibn Warraq

"My favorite book on Islam." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

Minty Alley
Author :C.L.R. James

"Plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]

The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Novel
Author :Tom Wolfe

"Shortly after I arrived in New York, [this author] claimed to have diagnosed the same syndrome in [this book]." - Christopher Hitchens [Source]
FAQs
Q1: What is the general topic of the books recommended by Christopher Hitchens?
Christopher Hitchen's recommended books cover a range of topics, but the general theme of his recommendations is that of independent-minded thought. His selection includes both fiction and non-fiction works that make for interesting conversation and thought-provoking stories.
Q2: How many books did Christopher Hitchens recommend?
Christopher Hitchens recommended about fifty books that he found to be intellectually stimulating and beneficial for readers to explore.
Q3: What is the most recent book recommended by Christopher Hitchens?
The most recent book that Christopher Hitchens recommended before his death was Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Amity Shlaes.
Q4: Who is the target audience for the books recommended by Christopher Hitchen?
Christopher Hitchens' books are primarily geared towards an adult audience who are interested in thinking deeply on challenging topics. His selections target people who seek to broaden their knowledge outside of the mainstream and to think in an independent, critical manner.
Q5: What are some common themes among Christopher Hitchens' book recommendations?
Common themes among Christopher Hitchens' book recommendations include language and linguistics, history, philosophy, science, and economics. He emphasized the importance of challenging convention and encouraged readers to explore a variety of sources to expand their understanding.