SOURCE: Garvey, Michael O. “Vanity Fair's Anarchist.” Commonweal (14 January 1994): 39–40.

In the following review, Garvey offers a positive assessment of For the Sake of Argument, though he objects to Hitchens's writings on Mother Teresa.

Christopher Hitchens writes prolifically for the Nation and Vanity Fair, two very different journals which bore and depress me respectively, so his work was fairly new to me when I began reading this series of essays [For the Sake of Argument]. In some corner of what's left of the Catholic ghetto—our kitchen, maybe—I'd heard about Hitchens's denunciation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, so I turned to that essay first. And there, sure enough, that little old Albanian nun familiar to most of us for her uncompromising devotion to the poor, sick, dying, and despised is described as “a dangerous and sinister person” who whores after power, stolen money, and the affections of...