SOURCE: Miller, Paul Allen. Review of Prepared for the Worst, by Christopher Hitchens. Southern Humanities Review 24, no. 4 (fall 1990): 371–73.

In the following review of Prepared for the Worst, Miller commends Hitchens's journalistic skill, but faults his one-dimensional rationality and tendency to conjure conspiracy theories.

Christopher Hitchens, in his new collection of essays, is, as always, a fine prose stylist. His sharp, analytical wit cuts through the absurdities and double-speak of so much contemporary journalism and takes a principled stand for “secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity.” His anticlerical, irreverent, and rational approach recalls the intellectual criticism of the Enlightenment, and this recollection is consciously, if subtly, cultivated throughout the entire book. It is no accident, then, that Prepared for the Worst opens with an essay on “Thomas Paine: The Actuarial Radical,” nor that the book jacket quotes Oliver Stone saying “a breath of Tom Paine for our time.” For, like...