Left Hooks, Right Crosses

Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Caldwell
November 2002     ISBN: 1560254092

Left Hooks, Right Crosses rounds up the principal characters and weighs in on the great issues of the Clinton era: impeachment, Elian Gonzalez, Monica, feminism, civil liberties, The Bell Curve, the Million Man March, the Future of the Left and the Future of the Right. But our editors are never predictable: You'll find conservative opponents of impeachment and radical supporters of it, leftist laments about the death of Liberal Outrage and right-wing frustration with the conservative silence on class and homosexuality, and thoughts about the affinities between the counterculture of the sixties and the Reagan era.

Comporting themselves with remarkable equanimity, Caldwell and Hitchens examine each other's choices and discuss in separate introductions just what they think of the picks. Hitchens admits that the right had the satirical edge during the decade while Caldwell confesses that if he had read Marshall Berman's salute to Marx at 15, "They might have had me."

"A superb collection of essays"

--The Weekly Standard

"They [Hitchens and Caldwell] undeniably are two of the sharpest, most agile writers in the game.... both editors' tastes are unquestionable, and most of the selections are shrewd and entertaining. On the left, Adolph Reed Jr. authoritatively debunks the The Bell Curve; Andrew Cohen has great fun with weak-thinking political groups angling to serve as outlets for Gen X outrage; Arundhati Roy and Susan Sontag offer trenchant observations on their subjects--India's nuclear bomb and Bosnia, respectively.... And Tom Frank's essay on our cheerful acceptance of the end of the 'affluent society' eerily anticipates a moment when we wouldn't be quite so cavalier about downward-shifting economic fortunes. There are also important reported essays that, in the liberal muckraking tradition, turn attention to Colombia's brutal war, the perils of workfare and the plight of prison inmates. The selections from the right are stylistically quite different, owing, as Hitchens concedes, to the '90s, which allowed for a 'renaissance of conservative writing and polemic.' Conservative writers generally lack the earnest concern that marks their colleagues on the left, and as a result the pieces feel freer, less encumbered by ideology, whether the topic is the increasingly unpredictable behavior of the Republican upper class (David Brooks); the odd way we treat adolescents, including adolescents with guns, as 'kids' (Jonathan Rauch); or the strange independence that John Kennedy Jr. achieved for himself (Peter Collier). There are pieces on both sides that will rattle readers, depending on their political points of view, but all of these essays are well-argued enough that no one is likely to stop reading any one of them."

--Washington Post

Christopher Hitchens is a widely published polemicist and frequent radio and TV commentator. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. He writes a weekly Washington column for the New York Press. His articles appear in The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, the New York Observer, Slate, The Spectator (UK), the Wall Street Journal and other publications.