Hitchens on Lelyveld, Zionism

Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

The Track of Sand, by Andrea Camilleri (Mantle), R230

THE 12th in the Inspector Montalbano series to be translated into English, this one sees the Sicilian cop investigating the brutal slaying of a race horse. If you're familiar with the series - the books' quirky humour, Montalbano's obsession with food and the lefty politics - you may find this a little formulaic, as if Camilleri's treading water. But it's a good, lazy weekend read.

THE ISSUE

One of this column's heroes, Christopher Hitchens, has penned an extraordinary review of Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (Knopf) for the Atlantic Review in which he pulls no punches in laying into Gandhi's questionable morality. It is a piece that deserves a wider audience, especially in this country.

Lelyveld, Hitchens writes, examines the conventional wisdom that his subject's ethical heroism was forged in South Africa - but his findings suggest something far grimmer happened here. "Thus," Hitchens suggests, "Gandhi and his followers were not much exercised by the treatment of black Africans in South Africa, alluding to them in print as 'kaffirs' and even organising medical orderlies and other noncombatant contributors for a punitive war against the Zulus."

Hitchens takes particular exception to Gandhi's peculiar resistance to modernity, and points out how he once lectured a member of the SA National Congress about the vices of Western clothing: "You must not . [be] ashamed of carrying an assegai, or of going around with only a tiny clout around your loins." Hitchens adds: "One tries to picture Nelson Mandela taking this homespun counsel, which draws upon the most cliched impression of African dress and tradition."

CRASH COURSE

More of same. Look out for The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, the Very Best of Christopher Hitchens, edited by Windsor Mann (Da Capo Press), which does what it says on the box, or as one review put it: "This book is a gleeful array of biting quips, twisty barbs and some disarmingly well-turned phrases."

In his foreword, Martin Amis suggests that Hitchens' puns, at times, were bad. As an example, he cites: "In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its own complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in the Latin form, 'no child's behind left'."

But elsewhere he was good, formidably so. To wit: "It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment."

THE BOTTOM LINE

"The Northern Pacific banned unnecessary whistle blowing on the Sabbath and profane language any day, but it slaughtered workers day in and day out." - Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, by Richard White (WW Norton & Company)

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