Douthat on Hitchens

Earlier this month I complained about Christopher Hitchens, particularly how his anti-religious bigotry affects his abilities as a book critic. Ross Douthat (who, like Hitchens, often contributes to The Atlantic) has a great review of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in the latest Claremont Review of Books. The first paragraph is classic:

Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege. For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case “g” throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. “I have been writing this book all my life,” Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, “and intend to keep on writing it.” One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.

Here’s the whole thing.