The book is notably lacking in quoted words or reported actions of Christopher Hitchens to support the author’s central thesis that Hitchens at the end of his life was “staring into the depths of eternity, teetering on the edge of belief.” The dozen such assertions in The Faith of Christopher Hitchens are backed by Hitchens’s unspoken thoughts, as interpreted—or guessed at—by Larry Taunton.
It’s Taunton who infers that Hitchens’s “reflexive atheism was showing significant cracks in it.”
It’s Taunton who mind-reads that Hitchens “didn’t believe everything he said about Christians and their religion.”
It’s Taunton who intuits that one of Taunton’s preachments had an effect on Christopher “so profound that I knew that something in his thinking had changed in that instant.”
From Hitchens himself, however, there is only silence in the place where the supporting quotation or anecdote should have been.
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